May 2012
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THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY REVIEWS LONDON PROM
It must have been an exhausting business being a composer in the 1840s, with the sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich mocking music's descriptive aspirations, French poets seducing the impressionable with their thick-perfumed, fevered, opiate laments, and the wraiths of ruined Germanic virgins sweeping through Europe like an occupying army in muslin nightdresses.
The quicksilver strings, gleaming horns and grassy woodwind of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra plunged the audience at Prom 51 into a whirlwind of overstimulation and hypersensitivity in conductor Thomas Dausgaard's cleverly contrasted programme of Berlioz, Schumann and Schnelzer. Classical and Romantic styles blurred disconcertingly in the Moderato-Allegro of Schumann's Zwickau Symphony (one of only two movements to survive), its orchestration treacherously top-heavy, an Alpine climb made while wearing velvet slippers. His Second Symphony was infused with light, a great gasp of Alpine air, any fraying at the edges of articulation the result of enthusiasm rather than torpor. Dausgaard conducted a vivacious, mercurial Scherzo filled with Beethovenian vigour and Schubertian fizz, while the shimmering trills and radiant arcs of the Adagio unfolded over a blissful, lilting accompaniment.
The most conventional and technically secure orchestration of the evening was heard in Schnelzer's 2007 conceit of skeletal trills, playful pauses and cartoonishly grimacing brass. Perhaps the lonely oboe represented Schnelzer himself, who clearly has an unfashionable interest in tunes of all colours. Perhaps, too, there is a limit to how many ways you can depict the macabre? If Haydn can be heard in A Freak in Burbank, so can Danny Elfmann, whose scores accompany Tim Burton's films. But this is a smart, likeable showpiece from a talented composer.
Undeterred by Nina Stemme's muffled French and glossed phrasing ... the SCO scampered merrily through the verdant landscape of the first song of Les nuits d'été, easing in to the blanched, baleful, stalker's lullaby of "Le spectre de la rose", the gamba-like cello and musky bassoon figures of "Sur les lagunes" and the tortured temperament of "Absence", its woodwind chords as precariously disposed as in the Schumann.
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