A pleasant, poignant and thought-provoking Penarth lunchtime Schubertiade – Seen and Heard Worldwide

United Kingdom Penarth Chamber Music Competition – Schubert: Katharine Dain (soprano), James Gilchrist (tenor), Ben Goldscheider (horn), Simon Crawford-Phillips (piano), Ágnes Langer (violin), Robert Aircraft (clarinet). Royal Welsh Faculty of Music and Drama, Cardiff, 29.6.2024. (GP)

Schubert – Auf dem Strom, D.943; Fantasie in C main, D934; Der Hirt auf den Felse, D.965

An hour of a summer time’s day spent listening to the music of Schubert can certainly by no means be time wasted. However when such a thoughtfully deliberate programme is carried out in addition to it was on this event and with an unaffected and welcoming sense of informality, it turns into a memorable expertise to be treasured and remembered.

This live performance was a part of the final day of the tenth Penarth Chamber Music Competition, of which the creative administrators are the cellist Alice Neary and the violinist David Adams. A lot of the Competition’s occasions happen in venues in Penarth, a pleasing seaside city some 5 miles south of Cardiff metropolis centre, however this live performance was a part of a day of occasions in Cardiff’s Royal Faculty of Music and Drama to mark the tenth Anniversary of the Competition.

All three of the works programmed had been written within the final yr of the composer’s all too temporary life – the Fantasie in C main in December 1827, ‘Auf dem Strom’ in March 1828 and ‘Der Hirt auf den Felse’ in October 1828. The final was, certainly, the penultimate composition accomplished by Schubert. Two of the works are considerably uncharacteristic of Schubert, insofar as they had been written particularly for efficiency by skilled virtuosi: the violinist Josef Slavík (one of many many to be dubbed a ‘second Paganini’) within the case of the Fantasie in C main, whereas ‘Der Hirt auf den Felse’ was written on the request of the operatic soprano, Anna Milder-Hauptmann (1785-1838). For apparent causes, each works present the featured soloist with extra alternatives for the ostentatious show of his or her technical expertise than Schubert’s wok usually does.

The trio of James Gilchrist, Ben Goldscheider and Simon Crawford-Phillips (an excellent accompanist all through) opened proceedings with ‘Auf dem Strom’ (On the River). As is so typically the case with Schubert, his setting reveals depths within the chosen poem of which the poet himself could properly have been unaware. At first studying, or when heard in inferior performances, the textual content of ‘Auf dem Strom’, by Ludwig Rellstab (the person who gave Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.14 its sobriquet of ‘The Moonlight Sonata’) seems merely to ‘document’ the phrases of a lover setting out on a journey which is able to take him away from his beloved, left behind on the financial institution. It does try this, however in Schubert’s setting it additionally does extra, because it actually did on this glorious interpretation. Within the poem’s opening strains [my quotations are from Richard Wigmore’s fine translation] ‘Nimm die letzten Abschiedsküsse, / Und die wehenden, die Grüsse, / Die ich noch ans Ufer sende,’ ‘Take these final farewell kisses, / And the wafted greetings / That I ship to the shore’, the language is comparatively colloquial, and serves to color a believable and recognisable state of affairs. By the start of the fourth stanza issues have modified; the language has a distinct type of energy: ‘Ach, von jener dunklen Wüste, / Fern von jeder heitern Küste, / Wo kein Eiland zu erschauen, / O, wie fasst mich zitternd Grauen!’; as set by Schubert, with urgent rhythms and acceptable harmonies,  the lover’s departure appears to have develop into a voyage into darkness and dying: ‘Ah, how I tremble with dread / At that darkish wilderness / Removed from each cheerful shore, / The place no island will be seen!’.  The trio performing this piece, having given us a touching account of the lover’s emotions as he left his beloved behind, now deepened the emotional import, because the efficiency took on a profounder sense of anguish, not least in Gilchrist’s expressive singing. The entire now appeared to learn by the protagonist’s worry of his personal dying. The impact was beautiful.

The Fantasie in C main, for violin and piano, has been thought by some to be a slightly ‘empty’ piece, stuffed with instrumental fireworks that means comparatively little. However one solely has to listen to a efficiency resembling that by Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien [Schubert: Complete Works for Violin and Piano, HYPERION CDA 67911/2] to grasp that there’s much more to it than that. Right here it received an thrilling – at occasions dazzling – efficiency from the younger Hungarian violinist Ágnes Langer and Simon Crawford-Phillips, a efficiency which additionally elucidated the work’s emotional content material, by way of each pleasure and poignancy. Though I had seen Langer’s title earlier than as a prize-winner in a number of important European comPetitions, this was the primary time I had heard her play, stay or recorded. I used to be very favourably impressed. The appreciable technical complexity of the writing for the violin posed no obvious issues for her and, whether or not in sweetly lyrical passages or the demandingly speedy components of the work her tone was at all times engaging and her management absolute. The writing for the piano has its difficulties too. The temporary Wikipedia entry on the work quotes some observations by Nikolai Lugansky: ‘This Fantasie by Schubert is probably the most troublesome music ever written for the piano. Harder than all of Rachmaninov’s concertos put collectively’. Clearly, there may be greater than a bit of rhetorical hyperbole on this declare, however there are actual sufficient difficulties within the Fantasie. Suffice it to say that Simon Crawford-Phillips was by no means in peril of being derailed by them.

We had been given a slightly particular introduction to the work. As we waited for the pianist and violinist to seem on the stage, they had been preceded by Gilchrist who, in his typical affable method, mentioned, with glorious comedian timing, ‘I can really feel bemusement spreading around the corridor, as you marvel, why is the tenor again on stage when the subsequent piece is only instrumental’. He accounted for his presence by explaining that one of many central actions of the Fantasie is made up of variations on the theme of a track by Schubert: Sei mir gegrüsst [I greet you], D.741, and that he would, joined by the hardworking Crawford Phillips, carry out the track for us, in order that we would have its melody in our minds when listening to the variations on it.

The Fantasie is made up of a number of quick actions that are solely loosely linked. Crawford-Phillips and Langer appeared to me to guage the tempo of the primary part (marked Andante molto) nearly completely. The following allegretto has one thing Hungarian about it and Langer was naturally very a lot at residence on this motion. Subsequent got here the theme and variations from Sei mir gegrüsst. There are 4 of them, the primary three being bravura items with lots of elaborate writing, particularly for the violin. These had been performed with pleasant panache. The ultimate variation has extra of the mild lyricism of D741 and was candy tenderness itself. The Fantasie’s conclusion is available in a type of ebullient ‘fantasy’ march, in which there’s an additional allusion to Sei mir gegrüsst – all dealt with with a certainty of tone and temper by Langer and Crawford-Phillips. Whereas not a characteristically Schubertian work, D934 is a hanging work in its personal proper, particularly when performed with the vibrancy and perception evident right here.

This rewarding and thought-provoking live performance closed with a vocal work – ‘Der Hirt auf den Felse’, which is so substantial that it would fairly be described as a chamber cantata slightly than a lied. Rebecca Evans (who’s the Patron of the ComPetition) was scheduled to be the soloist in ‘Der Hirt auf den Felse’ (‘The Shepherd on the Rock’), however she was compelled, by ‘sudden circumstances’ to withdraw. The organisers did very properly to search out a powerful alternative, within the type of Dutch-American soprano Katharine Dain. Though I used to be disillusioned to not hear Evans’s interpretation of this masterpiece, I used to be delighted by Katharine Dain’s account of it, within the firm of clarinettist Robert Aircraft and the indefatigable Crawford Phillips. Dain sang the work with all of the vocal energy and bravura it requires, however with a sensitivity to the textual content (mainly by Wilhelm Müller) that was equally spectacular; Dain has a voice of some weight, however she will be able to deal with it with splendid agility. Clarinettist Aircraft was spectacular in his obbligato function, matching Dain in rhythmic subtlety and displaying nice great thing about tone and color, particularly within the echoic passages early within the work. By now, the reader won’t be stunned to listen to that the work of Crawford Phillips was at all times exact but in addition at all times emotionally dedicated – whereas always supporting his colleagues he was by no means in any sense merely subordinate.

There are seven verses within the textual content of ‘Der Hirt auf den Felse’. Verses 1-4 and seven are by Wilhelm Müller; verses 5 and 6 will be the work of Helmina von Chézy or probably of Karl August Varnhagen von Ense. Questions of attribution matter little when one listens to the music, given the ability with which Schubert integrates all of the verses right into a coherent complete. The result’s a really Schubertian assertion about lonely ardour (Schubert’s and/or that of the imagined protagonist?). The primary two strains of the final verse – ‘Der Frühling will kommen, / Der Frühling, meine Freud’ – (‘Spring will come, / Spring, my delight’) introduced some radiantly attractive coloratura from Dain. However the implications of Müller’s verse shift subtly within the two strains which shut the poem: ‘Nun mach’ ich mich fertig / Zum Wandern bereit.’ (‘Now I shall put together / To go a-wandering’). The important thing phrase right here is ‘Wandern’. The Wanderer is a determine of nice significance within the music and poetry (or certainly the work of Caspar David Friedrich) of Schubert’s time as mentioned, for instance, in Andrew Cusack’s e book The Wanderer in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (Rochester, 2008). The Wanderer is commonly impelled by being rejected in love, characteristically being an emotionally unfulfilled determine, steeped in melancholy – generally to the purpose of in search of solace in dying. One thing of this type occurs subtly on the shut of ‘Der Hirt auf den Felse’; it’s, I think, flawed to grasp the closing strains as expressing hope for a renewal of affection within the ensuing Spring. The pacing and dynamics of this wonderful efficiency appeared to substantiate my long-held feeling that the closing strains specific not hope however the protagonist’s option to commit himself to a lifetime of wandering exterior society, his melancholy not relieved by the anticipation of Spring. One may additionally see this transition in one other approach. Up up to now Schubert has given the soprano, Anna Milder-Hauptmann, the type of quasi-operatic showpiece she evidently needed. However in his setting of those final two strains, we maybe hear Schubert’s personal voice extra clearly. The voice, that’s, of a person who should have recognized that his dying was not far off. Certainly, he didn’t stay lengthy sufficient to listen to the work premiered by Milder-Hauptmann in February 1830; he had died on November 19, 1828, simply weeks after finishing the track. What I determine because the foreknowledge of his personal dying informs the poem’s closing strains and I, for one, sensed this intense private significance when listening to this perceptive efficiency of ‘Der Hirt auf den Felse’.

On condition that the performers should have had a restricted time to organize collectively forward of this live performance, all three works obtained richly clever, technically assured and gratifying performances. The tenth anniversary of the Penarth Chamber Music Competition was properly celebrated – and so was Schubert!

Glyn Pursglove