Brahms festival highlight to die for
New Zealand International Arts Festival concert
Review in The Dominion Post
Monday, March 10, 2008
Reviewer Lindis Taylor
Considering myself a paid-up Schumann groupie since my teens, I particularly looked forward to this concert.
It was advertised as a narrative devised by Steven Isserlis, covering Robert and Clara Schumann’s relationship with Brahms, then Robert’s tragic last years in the 1850s’ interspersed with music by all three - the reality proved a little different.
There was probably too much narrative. If none was new to me, it could have been more interesting and perhaps moving, but Raymond Hawthorne delivered his material in stentorian fashion, as if he were reading a tale of high adventure, often with an archness or rotund, rhetorical exaggeration.
It demanded a low-key, intimate telling, with better German pronunciation.
We heard very little of Schumann’s post-1850 music and none of it would have banished doubts: a couple of attractive songs (Frühlingsankunft and Gebet) sung by fine Australian soprano Sara Macliver, a piano-accompanied “declamation”, a couple of uninteresting piano pieces, all with Michael Houstoun at the piano.
Houstoun, in fact, was the busiest musician; he also played Brahms’ Scherzo, Op.4 a Romance by Clara and the piano parts of two movements of the FAE sonata, the Schumann/Brahms collaboration, with violinist Wilma Smith in the Brahms and Isserlis (substituting cello for the original violin part) in Schumann’s lovely Intermezzo.
It was Isserlis’ only contribution in the first half, though he redeemed himself later in Brahms’ third Piano Quartet.
Brahms’ piano quartet in C minor is rarely performed, probably because of its subdued, elegiac character; but it was absolutely the high point of the evening.
Isserlis, Houstoun and Smith, with violist Caroline Henbest, gave a performance to die for - which was the point because it was Brahms’ response to Schumann’s death and to his supressed love for Clara.
The four achieved, in a short time together, a rapport and an intensity of approach to this beautiful and inspired music that normally comes from decades of work together.