Beethoven, Berg and Mozart
Usher Hall, 25/04/2025
RSNO, Patrick Hahn (conductor), Carolin Widmann (violin), Mhairi Lawson (sop), Hanna Hipp (mezzo), Jamie MacDougall (tenor), Laurent Naouri (baritone), RSNO Chorus
It was wonderful to walk into the Usher Hall on Friday evening to see a full house, for what might be called an ‘interesting’ programme. We had Mozart’s great Requiem in the second half, but a first half of an unknown Beethoven choral piece and Alban Berg’s late Violin Concerto was not guaranteed to bring in the punters. However, there they were, and there was a definite buzz about the hall beforehand. It must be said that the RSNO, certainly in Edinburgh, has been enormously successful this season in filling the auditorium, and with a noticeably younger audience than before.
We welcomed back the Principal Guest Conductor, the young German Patrick Hahn, who has dazzled in his previous concerts with the orchestra. Music Director in Wuppertal and Principal Guest Conductor of the Munich Radio Symphony Orchestra, Patrick is also an award winning jazz pianist, and this programme choice was apparently his own.
We started with a rarely heard choral piece, Elegischer Gesang (Elegiac Song), written in 1814 by Beethoven, in memory of the wife of a wealthy patron. Originally conceived for small chorus and string quartet, it is usually played by larger forces when played at all. I must confess to never having heard it, or even of it! It turned out to be a very beautiful short work, imbued with all Beethoven’s style, and a fitting tribute to its dedicatee. The full massed choir of the RSNO Chorus was a model of restraint, excellently trained by Stephen Doughty.
Patrick Hahn was keen to lead seamlessly into the Berg Violin Concerto, so the violin soloist, Carolin Widmann, was onstage for the Beethoven, and the Berg followed directly as the Gesang ended. I’m not quite sure of the rationale for this, as the violin concerto is very much in Berg’s 12 tone style, and to me, has little in common with mature Beethoven. It’s probably my fault, but I have never been able to get to grips with Berg’s music. I can appreciate the skill with which it is put together, and indeed there are some passages of haunting beauty, but I can find no soul in it. I once sang in his masterpiece, ‘Wozzeck’, and longed every night for the end, as I found the story and the music distasteful. Almost certainly “My Bad” as the young people say, but there we are, that’s my reaction. I can say that I found the playing of tonight’s soloist, Carolin Widmann, exquisite, with beautiful soft notes and poignant harmonics. Patrick Hahn was a most sympathetic accompanist, and the RSNO was on top form.
After the interval, a distinguished quartet of soloists joined the chorus and orchestra in Mozart’s Requiem. Vast amounts of trees have been felled to make the paper for the numerous stories and fables about the writing of Mozart’s Requiem, and the somewhat ludicrous play, ‘Amadeus’, by Peter Schaffer in 1979, turned into a film in 1984, has perpetuated the myth of a feud between Mozart and Salieri, which seems an early contestant for a Fake News Prize!
What is incontestable is that Mozart left the Requiem unfinished at his tragic early death in 1791, and his assistant, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, completed it using Mozart’s notes, but also composing some of it himself. Poor old Süssmayr has had a bad press ever since, but I think his completion is also a work of genius, and the whole Requiem is a miracle which we need to accept for what it is. Apparently, the version we heard on Friday was itself a modern ‘tidying up’ version made in 1971 by Franz Beyer, but I didn’t notice much that was different from the work I must have sung scores of times over the course of my singing career.
What was very nice was that I have sung with all four soloists tonight on numerous occasions in the past, particularly Jamie MacDougall and Laurent Naouri. Consequently, I was looking forward to hearing this distinguished quartet singing together in the Usher Hall, and they did not disappoint.
However, I must say I was really disheartened right from the start, as Patrick Hahn seemed determined to finish the concert in record time. The tempi were rushed almost from the first chords and this great masterpiece lost much of its majesty and dignity as it hurtled to its conclusion. The soloists never had time to breathe and develop a phrase, and the chorus was always being pushed to its limits. It was a surprisingly big chorus anyway, taking up a lot of the organ gallery, and Mr Hahn’s speeds didn’t help cohesion. Actually, they did a magnificent job, especially the sopranos, who were unstinting in their powerful singing, but it seemed they were always fighting against the tempi, and that only the impressive training by Stephen Doughty kept them on the rails!
In the quartet, the most poised singing came from the Scottish soprano, Mhairi Lawson. Her voice is not huge but it is beautifully focused, and she seemed very comfortable on stage. The last time I sang the Mozart Requiem (in Glasgow Cathedral with John Butt), Mhairi was the soprano (Beth Taylor was the mezzo!), and it really suits her. The Polish mezzo, Hanna Hipp, no stranger to Scottish audiences, made the best of her small solos, although the Recordare was so rapid that the subtlety of voice and clarinets was lost. Jamie MacDougall was stylish in his tenor contributions, but I felt Laurent Naouri was ill at ease, somewhat copy-bound and internalised. I wonder if he had a cold? Certainly, the sumptuous baritone voice that I sang with 20 years ago was strangely muffled. Brownie points, however, to Cillian O Ceallachain for his expert tenor trombone playing in the Tuba Mirum!
Even played too fast, Mozart’s Requiem is a thing of wonder, and the conclusion was greeted by great bravos and cheers from the packed house. I just needed more gravitas and weight from the conductor.
