The wealth of performances, whether brand new or archival, available online over the last four months has been wonderfully restorative. But much of what has been on offer has tended to be mainstream; anyone wanting something more challenging or iconoclastic could have been disappointed. Certainly the specially written lockdown pieces I’ve sampled, whether from the UK or farther afield, have been disappointingly thin.
Distance/Intimacy, the festival of new music from the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, curated by Daniel Barenboim and flautist Emmanuel Pahud, was a wonderful example of what can be done. Ten specially commissioned pieces were presented in four concerts across four nights (online until 12 August), framed by platform discussions with Pahud and Barenboim, and sometimes the composers, too, and each concert began with a piece by Boulez. The first was the early flute Sonatine, given a performance of steadily mounting intensity by Pahud and pianist Denis Kozhukhin; the ensemble pieces Messagesquisse, Mémoriale and Dérive I followed on successive evenings.
The commissions themselves were a mixed bag. Michael Jarrell, Philippe Manoury and Christian Rivet all wrote works for solo flute – wonderfully played by Pahud, but otherwise unremarkable. Of the others, the most striking were Johannes Boris Borowski’s Sphinxes for piano quartet and percussion, creating a world of glinting shards and explosive flurries, Irina Amargianaki’s Eumeniden, setting a passage from The Oresteia of Aeschylus, and Olga Neuwirth’s coronAtion II: Naufraghi del mondo che hanno ancora un cuore – cinque isola della fatica, an unwieldy title for a quintet for piano, strings and wind that dispersed the instrumentalists around the performing space before bringing them together for the work’s final resolution.
Browsing elsewhere I found two treasurable performances by the great German tenor Fritz Wunderlich, who would have been 90 this year. One features Wunderlich as a heart-stoppingly touching Lensky in a production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, sung in German, from the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1962, conducted by Josef Keilberth with Ingeborg Bremmert as Tatyana, Herman Prey as Onegin, and Brigitte Fassbaender as Olga. The other, sound only, has Wunderlich taking the solo tenor part in a performance of Stravinsky’s melodrama Perséphone, in German again rather than the original French. but bringing a vocal heft and lyrical intensity you rarely hear in this masterpiece of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period.
Finally, a tour de force from the violinist Malin Broman. A performance of the final Presto of Mendelssohn’s Octet – even one as thrilling as this – may not in itself be particularly noteworthy, except that Broman herself plays all eight string parts, violins, violas and cellos, in what is not just an outstanding demonstration of musical versatility but a marvel of multi-tracking, too.
My picks for the week ahead
This week’s lunchtime concerts from Glasgow City Halls, all broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and streamed on the City Halls website, may not be as extensive as June’s Wigmore series, and were certainly launched with less of a fanfare, but arguably they offer more adventurous and varied programmes. The bass-baritone Michael Mofidian, accompanied by Julia Lynch, begins the series on 14 July with Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Vaughan Williams; Steven Osborne plays Schubert’s last piano sonata, the B flat D960, and tenor Thomas Walker is partnered by harpsichordist John Butt in a Handel-centred programme, while percussionist Colin Currie ranges from Per Nørgård and Bryce Dessner to Toshio Hosokawa and Xenakis, via Stockhausen and Kevin Volans.
And on Friday, the 2020 BBC Proms begin. We’ve been promised six weeks of recordings from the Proms archive on Radio 3 and BBC4 before a final fortnight of live concerts performed in an empty Royal Albert Hall. Some details are still vague, but we do know that the opening night will include a specially commissioned mash-up of the Beethoven symphonies by Iain Farrington, a reprise of the premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s Panic, which so scandalised the Last Night audience in 1995, as well as Claudio Abbado’s unforgettable performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra from 2007.
