United Kingdom PROM 5 – Schoenberg, Zemlinsky: BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Ryan Bancroft (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London, 22.7.2024. (CK)
Schoenberg – Pelleas und Melisande
Zemlinsky – Die Seejungfrau
Schoenberg and Zemlinsky? It was bold of the BBC to recreate a Viennese concert in 1905 by harnessing these two fin de siècle behemoths (by composing brothers-in-law) together, and brave of Ryan Bancroft and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales to take them on. Both are expensive to mount: Pelleas und Melisande requires over a hundred players and Die Seejungfrau isn’t far behind. Just one of them, perhaps coupled with a popular concerto, would have made better commercial sense (poor Schoenberg – his name still automatically evokes the phrase Box Office Death).
But this is what the Proms, uniquely, can do, providing us with precious opportunities to hear pieces in unusual and illuminating contexts. Planners and performers were rewarded, not with a full house (the Rausing Circle was sparsely populated) but with the palpable commitment and enthusiasm of those who were there.
Schoenberg wrote Pelleas und Melisande before he began to feel the influence of Mahler: Richard Strauss is certainly there (Paul Griffiths, in his programme note, tells us that it was Strauss who directed the young Schoenberg to the topic), but in Schoenberg’s unfolding drama (unlike that of a Strauss tone poem) no one element – a character, a theme – stands clear of the others: they are continually meshing, changing shape in the unceasing tug and pull of the music in a psychodrama that mirrors Maeterlinck’s symbolist play, in which nothing is certain and no one is knowable. Outside the decaying castle is the forest, that central Expressionist symbol for the Unconscious: and it is all too easy, in the thickets of Schoenberg’s complex texture, to lose one’s way.
Except in a performance like this. Big pieces have more room to breathe in the Royal Albert Hall: but the performance’s success was not merely a matter of acoustics. Bancroft sculpted the performance with his batonless hands, charting the music’s oceanic swell around the great climaxes as clearly as the passages where solo instruments entwine like filaments of light. And, as my companion remarked, he kept the faster sections moving, so that flexibility averted monotony. The playing of the BBC NOW was superb and often very beautiful: they and the conductor seemed to be inside this difficult music (I almost wrote ‘comfortably inside’, but that would give entirely the wrong impression).
Invidious, perhaps, to pick out highlights, but hard not to: the delightful, waltz-like flutes as Melisande plays with the ring by the fountain, solo instruments leading to a magical string texture; flutes again, eerie with harps; a quiet bass drum, muted trombones and those flutes again, flutter-tonguing this time, warning us that the ominous Fate theme is once more on its way. Or, after Schoenberg, for reasons best known to himself, has taken us back to the beginning (about two-thirds of the way through), the shimmering, unearthly sounds (Griffiths calls them ‘curtains of falling stars’) with which Schoenberg returns us to the story and prepares us for its end.
It is possible, with hindsight, to detect tonality straining at the leash in Pelleas und Melisande; but in Die Seejungfrau, as in everything he wrote, Zemlinsky remained resolutely and gorgeously tonal. From its bottom-of-the-sea stirrings to its shining ending, three movements and forty minutes later, it ravishes the sympathetic ear: harps often in play, woodwind darting like fish or glistening like jewels in the darkness. No shortage of excitement: the wedding festivities that open the second movement brought the Hochzeitsstück in the corresponding movement of Mahler’s youthful Das klagende Lied to mind; and Bancroft handled this movement’s climaxes magnificently. The third movement was also beautifully played, from its hushed opening via spooky muted trumpets and trombones, solo horn and harps and the most delicate sounds in upper strings, increasing in volume and tension to a marvellous climax (spectacular timpani).
Zemlinsky may not have broken new ground as a composer, but it is very clear that his music has its own kind of gorgeousness. Another BBC Prom performance of the Lyric Symphony, or the opera Der Zwerg, would be most welcome. Meanwhile, hats off to Ryan Bancroft and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales for one of the headiest concerts I can remember.
Chris Kettle