NCH, Dublin
Haydn: Symphony No 85 (La Reine); arias by Haydn, Mozart, Bizet.
There was a slightly unusual atmosphere in the National Concert Hall on Wednesday. Audiences and ambiences differ from night to night, but on Wednesday there was a bevy of official-looking people wearing braid on their sleeves, and the pre-concert murmur when the audience was fully seated was exceptionally restrained.
The Ocean Sun Festival had come to town. Hapag-Lloyd Cruises’
MS Europa
(“the highest- ranked cruise ship in the world”, says the company) was docked in Dublin and its star-studded classical concert programme marked Dublin debuts for soprano Christiane Karg, mezzo soprano Magdalena Kozena, tenor Michael Schade, and conductor Ariel Zuckermann.
Zuckermann set the tone of the evening with his performance of the opening work, the fourth of Haydn’s
Paris
symphonies, nicknamed
La Reine
because it was a favourite of Marie Antoinette.
He delivered it with a lightness of touch, a sharpness of instrumental focus and a tautness of musical argument that are not often found in the Orchestra of St Cecilia’s playing of Haydn. It was the kind of performance that never seemed to need to raise its voice to make even the most penetrating of points.
Zuckermann’s teachers include the period instruments specialist Bruno Weil and all three singers have early music experience, too.
Kozena and Schade have long worked with the best conductors in the field and Karg, the youngest of the trio, has upcoming performances of Monteverdi’s
Coronation of Poppea
with Glyndebourne Touring Opera, and Rameau’s
Castor et Pollux
at the Theater an der Wien under Christophe Rousset.
The evening’s repertoire centred on Mozart (five arias and one duet), framed by Haydn and Bizet. It didn’t take long for Karg to show an attractive combination of soft radiance and sheer brilliance.
Schade is a light, agile, delightfully clear-toned tenor, the kind of tenor who gives the impression that no note, however high or low, is more awkward or out of reach than any other one. His Mozart is at once highly individual and highly stylish.
Kozena, of course, is altogether
sui generis
, a singer who doesn’t seem to have to do anything, just to be and sing, and wrap emotional truthfulness in the most gorgeous of sounds.
In two arias from
Carmen
, she let her voice do all the seduction, a seduction based on strength of character rather than the more- or-less cadging efforts that are commonly heard. And Cherubino’s
Voi che sapete
from Mozart’s
Nozze di Figaro
was a miracle of innocence blended with the experience of desire.
The evening’s one Mozart duet,
Fra gli amplessi
from
Così fan tutte
, was a peach, too, with Karg and Schade capturing a real sense of the wonder of unexpected amorous involvement.
Ah! If only we could get to hear singers like this in opera productions in Ireland, rather than merely as guests of a visiting cruise liner.
