Berg reviews

‘Ruby Hughes rises to the challenge with bombproof technical strength and control, plenty of firepower where needed, and a thrilling instinct for capturing the persona of this fearsome anti-heroine,’ writes Malcolm Hayes. 

Clytemnestra
Berg: Altenberg Lieder; Mahler: Rückert-Lieder; Rhian Samuel: Clytemnestra 
Ruby Hughes (soprano), BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Jac van Steen
BIS BIS-2408 (hybrid CD/SACD)   54:46 Mins

The Rite of Spring does not dominate here, not because the performance is lame. Rather, it is part of something truly exceptional, joined here by masterpieces from Webern, Berg and Ligeti in performances of outstanding beauty, passion and power. This film captures a concert at the Barbican from January 2015, when the public courtship between the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle was still ongoing and their artistic marriage not yet certain.

This is the last of Warner’s annual gleanings from the Lugano Festival at which Martha Argerich presides – and definitely the most exciting. She may be 76, but her playing has lost none of its phenomenal precision and brilliance; it’s a rare pleasure to hear her playing solo in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, which she has never before committed to disc. In every shared track she induces her ‘friends’ – including the excellent Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana – to raise their game to a level with hers.

There are more corpses in Berg’s epoch-making opera, Wozzeck (1914-22), than the two literal ones of its devastating final scenes. Underpinning the harrowing tale of a tormented soldier and the girlfriend he brutally murders is a searing, apocalyptic vision of a society so inhumane as to signal the death – as Berg witnessed, during and after World War One – of any illusion of a just or genteel modern civilisation.

William Kentridge’s staging of Lulu, co-produced with New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Dutch National Opera, was English National Opera’s surprise hit last autumn. After Mark Wigglesworth’s savage, lyrical account of the score, it is fascinating to now hear Lothar Koenigs’s pristine approach in this live recording from New York, with Marlis Petersen as the super-sexualised young woman who claims that she ‘never pretended to be anything but what men see in me’, in her tenth and final production of Berg’s unfinished opera.

Drawing on the works of four favourite composers, soprano Ruby Hughes’s recital brings together 16 songs about night, ‘a time for contemplation, meditation, sleep and dreams’, as she describes it in her introductory note.

Her singing is exceptional for its consistency. Though her tone is light and delicate, it’s invariably true in pitch and capable of a surprising range of dynamic variety – a perfect instrument of its kind. Every word she sings comes through clearly.

Minor keys often brought out the best in Mendelssohn, and the passionate outbursts in the first movement of this A minor Quartet have an intensity matched by the players and by the recording’s immediate sound. There’s subtlety in the rubato and tonal variety, and the blend of the instruments is exact while allowing four distinct but complementary personalities to emerge. The slow movement, which could become sentimental, has a stern backbone, and the Intermezzo contrasts poise and fleetness of foot.