Symphony No 3 (Eroica) - Beethoven
Parsifal (exc) - Wagner
`Wayward" was one word which came to mind repeatedly during Beethoven's Symphony No 3 at the National Concert Hall last Friday night. "Exciting" was another. Conductor Alexander Anissimov's dramatised approach to this music subverted convention, but did not always convince.
Ignoring some of the composer's tempo markings and adding some of his own, Anissimov stressed the extreme aspects of this revolutionary work. Sometimes momentum was massive and sustained. Then it would be stopped to make a point which, more often than not, needed no emphasis. Nevertheless, this account had its moments, including good playing from the National Symphony Orchestra's horns in the Scherzo.
This concert was the last in the Beethoven/Wagner series, and the latter composer was represented by perhaps the most difficult of his works to reduce to "bleeding chunks", Parsifal. Ideally, a concert would include the ritual scenes from Act III; but the forces required make that impractical here. What we got was the Prelude, plus the long scene for Kundry and Parsifal in Act II.
Difficult enough on the stage, this scene is not natural concert fare. Christine Tear (soprano) and Alan Woodrow (tenor) were good at the declamatory and persistently intense vocal parts, though there was a visual mismatch between Tear's readiness to move this way and that with the music's surging emotion, and Woodrow's rather stiff deportment.
Nevertheless, the performance captured the essence of this enigmatic encounter. The religious finesse of the Prelude was well-sustained; in the vocal scene the NSO's playing was full-blooded and, on the whole, disciplined. Above all, the scene worked because of Anissimov's feel for timing and purpose, in music where so much of the drama is carried by the orchestra.
