Between warhorse works from Beethoven and endlessly shifting combinations from Wagner and Mahler, scores gain a multi-toned edge with a dash of tautness.
MILAN, ITALY – Years on, the breadth of La Scala’s offerings continues apace, bringing forth two warhorse works that dominated the scene this week.
Nikolai Lugansky’s program presented Mendelssohn’s 6 Lieder ohne Worte (6 songs without words) and after twenty minutes moved on to Beethoven’s Tempest – showcasing the pianist’s ability to negotiate an extreme technical challenge while remaining oddly multi-toned in his playing.
Lugansky does not do charm, but rather lots of heavy keyboard pyrotechnics are delivered in fierce and take-it-or-leave-it ways. One can note that delicacy and poise aren’t part of his worldview, but I’m guessing that such counterpoints are what makes his practice a puzzling one. The second part of the concert was devoted to Wagner, or rather to how Wagner viewed pianistic climaxes.
A series of piano transcriptions were signed by Lugansky: Four scenes from Götterdämmerung (Love Duet between Brünnhilde and Siegfried, Siegfried’s Journey on the Rhine, Funeral March and Brunhilde’s Sacrifice). It concluded with Liszti’s transcription for piano of Isoldes Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, a piece suffusing poignant lyricism.
Nikolay Lugansky. Photograph: Marco Borggreve
All were played correctly, no liberties were taken and nothing was overly exaggerated. Still, equally, there was nothing much that brought these pieces alive, giving them the shape and enrapturing colour they retained. However brilliantly he hurls out a vast plethora of notes at maximum pace, the music feels somewhat tethered.
The dimension and weight of the group that shaped Mendelssohn’s pieces had a dramatic narrative shaping the score, but the coloratura could have been gained more subtlely. All the virtuoso passages in Tristan und Isolde’s third act were dispatched to great effect, but I wished that what came between them was a tad more fetching.
Speaking of engaging effects and orchestral virtuosity, Riccardo Chailly’s direction of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 7 felt more than usual like a team performance between instruments and conductor, with Chailly shaping the orchestra to support the composer’s detailed work. From the opening onwards, Chailly was always focused in the mix, his playing taut and impassioned, the orchestra weighty yet finely coloured overall, maximising the music’s grandeur without making it indulgent in any manner.
Of all Mahler’s symphonies, the Seventh is the most enigmatic, and in its musical vernacular, the most far-reaching and forward-looking. It showcased La Filarmonica’s current form: strings sounded rich and velvety, and the wind and brass soloists played skilfully in Mahler’s endlessly shifting sequences of tone colour.
Riccardo Chailly
Chailly conducted the piece with balanced tautness and a vein of lightness, bypassing the key bombastic elements and making something especially effective in the moment of the finale when the fierce ending section is transformed into something brisk.
It provides a sheer demonstration of what a fine Mahler interpreter he is, in what is arguably the most challenging of the symphonies which, in turn, demonstrates orchestral combinations that are thrilling but lack coherence between one another. Chailly’s baton, however, proved to be an exercise in sonic virtuosity that strived for effect, excess and control.
by Chidozie Obasi