BBCSSO, 17/11/2022
Abrahamsen : Vers le silence (UK première)
Wagner (arr. Wigglesworth) : Götterdämmerung - A Symphonic Journey (Katherine Broderick, soprano)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ryan Wigglesworth
Hans Abrahamsen is a noted contemporary Danish composer, celebrating his 70th birthday this year. He is perhaps currently best known for his recent opera The Snow Queen. Vers le silence was composed during 2020/21, and is a four-movement, large-scale orchestral work. The movements evoke the elements, with Air and Water being particularly clearly evoked, and most start in tumult, before calming down to an almost dream-like state, and an almost glacial beauty. With a completely unknown piece, and a composer whose work I know little of, it's hard to say how well played this was, but it felt like a persuasive performance, with some lovely textures emerging from the orchestra.
In making a largely orchestral compression of the last opera of Wagner's Ring cycle, Ryan Wigglesworth was no doubt influenced by Henk de Vlieger's similar forays into this area. Wigglesworth has kept things fairly simple by comparison, however, with just four movements; the Dawn music, love duet and Siegfried's Rhine Journey from the Prologue as the first movement and the Scherzo, and from Act 3 the Death of Siegfried and Funeral March as the slow movement, and the Immolation Scene, with vocal soloist, as the finale. It works well enough, though considering that Wigglesworth stated, in the programme note, finding the 'bleeding chunks' approach to Wagner's operatic music in concert unsatisfying, it seems to me that that is still pretty much what we got, since the opera has been reduced to its best-known sequences.
Still, nothing can really diminish the splendour of Wagner's score, and Wigglesworth and the orchestra went at it full throttle, relishing its riches without reserve. This did give Katherine Broderick a little trouble when using the lower half of her register, making her a little hard to hear when the orchestra was playing at full strength, but not often, and Wagner's writing is usually too careful for that, not making the soprano sing low too often against the full orchestra. Otherwise, Broderick was an admirable Brünnhilde, with a gleaming, thrilling timbre, soaring high notes, and she does have the lower register required too. She sings with quite a lot of vibrato, but it's tight and well-controlled, and helps her sound carry over the orchestra, as they brought the concert to a close in a blaze of fire and a cascade of water.
[Next : 23rd November]