The Camerata RCO is distinguished by its unique make-up: all its members are also players in the prestigious Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. Playing within that orchestra is a source of great joy for them, but they also find a particular pleasure in performing together in a smaller formation — tonight, six musicians — which cannot fail to disconcert some listeners who thought they were attending a concert by the famous Dutch orchestra. The surprise is greater still when the programme puts forward works that normally call for substantial orchestral forces: Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7. Excellent orchestral reductions do exist, of course — one thinks of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. But even setting aside every previous performance for full orchestra heard in concert or on disc, one could only approach such a proposition with apprehension. Was the wager won?
The Four Last Songs: charming, but too light and too fast
In an impulse of rejection of his own age and a wish to reconnect with his musical roots, Richard Strauss composed a series of hypnotic, airborne lieder, more than fifteen of them orchestrated, on texts by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff. Although Hesse, his neighbour, despised Strauss to the point of refusing even to greet him, Strauss chose his poems to build a musical farewell in which a serene renunciation of traditional European culture is expressed, and a farewell too to the love of the female voice he had so cherished. The Four Last Songs, composed between June and September 1948, follow no single theme, but give off an overall colour of melancholy and of a gentle yet heart-rending acceptance of life’s end. The work is conceived less as a traditional cycle than as a bath of sound intended to magnify the beauty of the voice and gently to tame death. The first performance, posthumous, was not given in the order Strauss intended but arranged according to the publisher’s wishes, with a change that accentuates a gradual descent into night. The music, shot through with quotations from his own works and from Wagner’s, unfolds a series of sound-pictures in which the voice spreads over an orchestral ground that alternates between transparency and intensity, reflecting a life that ends in a calmed contemplation of death. The point will be clear: lyrical and intimate as it is, Strauss nonetheless conceived a work of luxuriant orchestral texture. What remains of it here?
The soprano Miah Persson accompanies the Camerata tonight; her stage presence, her radiant smile and her timbre recall those of Renée Fleming, though her voice offers a distinct lightness, with less immediate power and a noticeable vibrato, notably in the first song, “Frühling”. In this ensemble arranged for six musicians (piano, violin, viola, cello, horn, clarinet), one catches at moments the style of Zemlinsky, particularly in the sometimes surprising and slightly sour alliance of clarinet and piano. This less opulent texture, combined with rather quick tempi, gives a sense of something missing, perhaps due to the reduction of forces, hence an impression of hampered dynamics in which one finds oneself listening to a familiar work in a new light, trying all the same to take it without prejudice. Singing from memory, Persson brings a palpable intimacy to the performance, which becomes increasingly convincing vocally. With “Beim Schlafengehen” the evening takes a more moving turn. Here the soprano’s voice gains in assurance and expressiveness, unfolding with a grace that holds the whole audience. The synergy between soprano and ensemble reaches a more assured balance. The delicate intervention of Coraline Goern’s violin, in particular, adds a lyrical and poignant dimension. This moment reveals all the finesse of the reduced arrangement and lets the subtle nuances of the orchestration shine with renewed clarity. In “Im Abendrot”, the approach chosen by the ensemble reveals both its strengths and its limits. The tempo, to my mind too quick, leaves little room for the twilight reverie that lingers over the memory of evanescent earthly delights. Though this unusual speed sets off the clarity and precision of Miah Persson’s voice — perfect diction, fine understanding of the text — it also tends to diminish the emotional density the work is meant to create.
Despite the undeniable qualities of this soprano, who at moments recalls the freshness of Lisa Della Casa more than the lofty, stratospheric character of legendary performances such as Gundula Janowitz’s or the density of Jessye Norman, one regrets the lack of the orchestral thrill that normally marks this work. The absence of a certain sonic intoxication and of orchestral depth — and so of a conductor with a vision (one thinks of Kurt Masur, or closer to us Marek Janowski) — makes itself felt: all elements essential to transcending the experience of these songs, counted among the most touching and extraordinary of the post-Romantic repertoire, incandescent jewels that mark the end of a musical age. Applause called for an encore which, alas, went unanswered.
A very dancing, gypsy-toned Dvořák Seventh, but without the breath of epic
The evening continued with a bold account of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor. The first movement, Allegro maestoso, highlights the cello of Johan van Iersel — remarkable, committed, deep — which does justice to one of the Czech composer’s darkest themes. The normally epic, brass-lit character of the first theme can only lack force, the reduction including a single horn, and the ensemble has not the necessary momentum. When the second melody appears, however, intimate and songful, the proposition becomes more acceptable. The end of the movement, marked by a slightly strange accelerando, prompts more reservations. It is certainly the second movement that proves more convincing, with its recollected, melancholy tone, evoking Schubert at moments, intimate, bringing out the Slavic “dumka”, dreamy and nostalgic. The third movement shines by its gypsy character, anticipating the scherzo of Mahler’s Titan and bringing the necessary fire to this reinterpretation, despite some longueurs and a piano too discreet. The Allegro molto of the finale, colourful and pleasantly played, at times lacks the firm structure and cutting accents Dvořák’s music requires here. Particularly expressive moments, such as the grating interventions of the clarinet and the exemplary violin playing, are high points of this scaled-down reading, even if the whole has lost in nuance and coherence. Here too one regrets the absence of an encore.
So, interesting and at times moving as the experience was, it revealed the limits of such a reduction for two works of this scale. Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7, with its legends and its vast sonic spaces, seems to ask more than this formation could offer. Despite the challenges posed by reducing the forces for this monumental symphony, it would be churlish not to enjoy an evening spent in the company of soloists of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, whose musical level remains exemplary.
The musicians, with their technical mastery and artistic sensitivity, offered moments of real beauty and deep expression, in an admittedly atypical format. It allowed us all the same to appreciate a sample of this prestigious orchestra.
Read also: Strauss and Beethoven — Herbert Blomstedt and the Berliner Philharmoniker · Scheherazade and Petrushka — Les Siècles in Grenoble
