Strikingly tender Liszt from Yuja Wang, slow-burn Sibelius and sumptuous Strauss from the Oslo Phil

United KingdomUnited Kingdom BBC Proms 2022 [15], Prom 35 – Sibelius, Liszt, R. Strauss: Yuja Wang (piano), Oslo Philharmonic / Klaus Mäkelä (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London, 12.8.2022. (MBr)

Klaus Mäkelä © BBC/Chris Christodoulou

Sibelius – Tapiola
Liszt – Piano Concerto No.1 in E flat major
R. Strauss – Ein Heldenleben

Klaus Mäkelä and the Oslo Philharmonic have been quite frequent visitors to the United Kingdom this year. This was his Prom debut and, at 26, a relatively youthful one. The great American conductor Thomas Schippers once said that his career was based on a large element of luck and so far Klaus Mäkelä has been gifted with a considerable amount of it too. But like Schippers, Mäkelä is an undeniable talent – both conductors being accomplished chamber music players, for example, an indispensable gift for a great conductor to have. There is also, I think, a shared belief in destiny and a conviction that a performance never lacks a sense of its own righteousness. Some might call this arrogance; others just what it is – getting close to the perfect performance.

In Sibelius he is a known quantity. His recent cycle of the complete symphonies with this orchestra is superb, but if you want a conductor to throw curveballs then Mäkelä tossed his first one at the very beginning of his concert. The opening work, Tapiola, defied time. The sheer density of this piece is immense, with some performances sounding as if the strings are crawling through mud. Mäkelä didn’t quite go to this extreme but the string patterns felt very heavy, more like dug out trenches rather than shallow lines. Mäkelä can keep tempos moving – sometimes the strings didn’t so much scuttle, but sprint, and when the music receded after the first section’s climax I felt he was simply conducting space or the air around the music with nothing between the notes.

There is devastation and the elemental in this music, too, and its collapse becomes total – although it is not kindred to Mahler’s Ninth. It should probably have played to Mäkelä’s strengths and would have had he let his Norwegians turn up the volume, but he didn’t. And if a moment asked for the Brucknerian – in the way that Karajan applied Bruckner to Tapiola – this performance would have basked in a correction to the curveball that had taken it so off course. When I looked at my watch after this performance it implied I had sat through a poem; it very much felt, however, I had sat through a symphony.

Yuja Wang with members of the Oslo Philharmonic © BBC/Chris Christodoulou

Yuja Wang was the soloist in Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No.1 in E flat major. The great Chinese pianist Fou Ts’ong once spoke of taste and subtlety in Chopin and how that specifically appealed to oriental pianists – and it is probably no coincidence it does given the extraordinary number of Chinese and South Korean pianists who excel in this composer. A notable characteristic of their Chopin is exquisite elegance and refinement – even humanity – but does this apply to Liszt, a composer at a very different end of the pianistic spectrum?

The most striking thing about Wang’s Liszt wasn’t the barnstorming virtuosity it was the tenderness, lyricism and sheer beauty of it. Wang’s style of playing is not immediately appealing. She is overly rigid at the keyboard, although as with so much about her it is a bit of a deception. She is, in fact, hugely flexible although can remain entirely still while spanning the whole keyboard. Although there is considerable power in her playing, the elegance of motion through her neck and head is wonderful to see. It is like watching an imperious swan float against the current in a fast-moving river.

Although the opening of the concerto is marked Allegro maestoso Wang wasn’t that imposing in interpreting it that way. If the cadenzas in this movement were solidly virtuosic the playing never sounded intentionally laden with the kind of finger work that would gild the lily. It formed a beautiful preface to an Adagio of astounding colour and gripping keyboard control. Notes glided into each other, and you got pianissimos that hovered with such perfect weight and length. Interchanges between black and white keys were like operatic recitative. A skittish Allegretto was light as a butterfly, with its wings ever so gently uncovering colours here and there and then covering them up again. If these middle movements gave the impression of them having been played under a parasol, Wang dramatically discarded it at the opening of the fourth movement’s Allegro. This was the only time one felt she was taking the music somewhere else, although it spends a lot of its time rounding up previous themes. Even here I felt she held back on some of the power she probably could have thrown at the music with some headroom to spare. An encore of Horowitz’s Variations on themes of Bizet’s Carmen was hyper-virtuosic; nothing casual about it in the slightest.

Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben is a workout for any orchestra and conductor. The spectre of Maris Jansons loomed over this performance in several ways – he was a previous Music Director of the Oslo Philharmonic, and Klaus Mäkelä is scheduled to become the Concertgebouw’s Chief Conductor in 2027, a post that Jansons held for almost two decades. More importantly, Jansons was, in my view, the greatest Strauss conductor at the time of his death – and no more so than in this very work (even if he did add to Strauss’s orchestration).

More than in most comparable works, Ein Heldenleben can expose both a conductor’s shortcomings and his gifts to quite glaring effect. We got considerably more of the latter with Mäkelä. Almost nothing matters more in this work than a good ear; the ability to let us hear instruments, and the details in the score. This performance felt like Mäkelä was using his chamber music experience to highlight individual voices, to encourage his players to listen to each other. Some of the woodwind playing was just exquisite. In The Hero’s Adversaries the interchanges between the flutes, clarinets and oboes was gloriously conversational – never a case of the soloists simply playing the notes, rather playing off each other, following each other’s entries and exits. The Hero’s Companion is Strauss at his most opulent in Ein Heldenleben, music of ravishing intensity. It suited Mäkelä’s sumptuous way with romanticism and the kind of sound he wanted from his orchestra. Perhaps volume wasn’t always as loud as one would have liked, and the Oslo strings lacked some depth, but Mäkelä encouraged a voluptuous potency from them. The problem of Mäkelä sometimes appearing to conduct air rather than between the notes reappeared only rarely during this HeldenlebenThe Hero’s Companion felt a little stretched by the end of it – but where one imagined he might have had a problem with this he didn’t. The climax to The Hero’s Works of Peace (before the Im zeitmas marking) had been played with extraordinary beauty and lushness of tone. Almost the whole section preceding it had had perfectly audible harps – never a given in performances of this work. The great string theme of The Hero’s Retirement was approached with beguiling hesitancy before culminating in a full-on radiantly played passage of ravishing intensity.

This was a notable Ein Heldenleben in that its first violin and first horn were both played by women. I don’t think it fundamentally altered the sound or direction of the performance – although it perhaps shone more of a light on the importance of women in Strauss’s output. The violin solos of Elise Båtnes were exquisite and perhaps – yes – just perhaps a touch warmer, and sometimes less certain, than one might hear in other orchestras. Inger Besserudhagen’s horn, too, felt glowing rather than burnished, a touch brighter too. But the tendency of this orchestra’s ‘critics’ in Mäkelä’s Ein Heldenleben had been less coercive and less corrosive. This had been a Heldenleben high on opulence rather than brimming with caustic dazzle. And it had been one where we had been allowed to hear a lot more of the detail than we usually do.

The one encore, Johann Strauss II’s Csárdás from Ritter Pásmán was just plain gorgeous. Hedonistic, velvety, pumped with Viennese adrenalin it sounded magnificent. A great end to a concert that started as a slow burn but worked up to a white-hot blaze.

Marc Bridle

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