The musical 2022 begins in a big way

It is difficult to imagine a more attractive start to the year: at the Royal Theater, on Saturday, the two most international Norwegian musicians of the moment, the soprano Lise Davidsen and the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, in a natural meeting that was called to take place sooner than late and that he has not been able to disappoint anyone; in the National Auditorium, on Sunday, on the contrary, an already classic visit to the repeated force, that of Yevgueni Kissin to the Ibermúsica cycles, which he has faithfully frequented since his debut in 1988, when he was only 16 years old, without being Since then, it is not possible to remember a single disappointing performance by the Russian pianist. In the case of the visit of the former, we have been doubly lucky, because the initial concert of the planned tour, which should have been held at the Oslo Opera House on January 4,It was canceled due to the current restrictions in force in the country, and the second, two days later at the Berlin Staatsoper, had James Baillieu as pianist, since Andsnes had tested positive for covid. The long-awaited first tour of Davidsen and his compatriot has therefore begun in Madrid, and will continue, if fates do not interfere with their plans again, in Munich, Vienna and London.

Unlike the theaters in these cities, where seats are sold out or about to run out (all tickets were also sold in Berlin), at the Royal Theater there were many - too many - empty seats. The loyalty of the public for operatic productions seems a subject largely approved for years, but the recitals - the substantial ones, not the insipid or commercial ones - still do not attract fans to the Plaza de Oriente in Madrid: on a Saturday, With two top-level artists at the zenith of their abilities and with an equally engaging and intelligent program, it's hard to understand why. But it is very possible that they are concerts of the highest level like this one, and not

or

, the true thermometer to more accurately calibrate the real level of the musical culture of a city.

Last week the first joint recording of Davidsen and Andsnes was published (an album dedicated monographly to Edvard Grieg, how could it be otherwise), hence the first part of his recital was entirely dedicated to his compatriot.

With excellent judgment, they chose two complete collections: op.

48, revealer of the Grieg with a Germanic background, devoted to the art of Robert Schumann and who draws on several of the great poets of the German Romantic canon (Heine, Goethe, Geibel, Uhland) and also includes an original nod to the medieval

Walther von der Vogelweide;

and op.

67,

, a cycle of songs that Grieg himself had for his greatest lyrical effusion and whose choice of poems, by Arne Garborg, transcended the purely musical, since they are written in

, the new Norwegian, a linguistic synthesis of different Norwegian dialects Westerners, which some defended as the true national language as opposed to

, the then official Norwegian Danish.

At 34, Lise Davidsen was received and fired as a great singing diva, something that is undoubtedly on the way to being, although it may be premature to enthrone her as such. Her career could not have started better, due to her approach, her achievements and the different steps that the Norwegian soprano is taking. Her attitude on stage, in which she wore the two dresses of rigor, one by part, was almost always seraphic, restrained, and that is precisely what she transferred to her singing. Davidsen is, above all, an opera singer: by temperament, by vocal power, by technique, by training, in an operatic performance she feels like a fish in water and this was confirmed in her important debut at the Aix-en Festival -Provence in

or in his impressive

at the Royal Opera House with Jonas Kaufmann and Antonio Pappano.

She, like a magnet, and not only because of her height and imposing physique, ends up concentrating all eyes.

In the intimacy of the

, however, one can glimpse in her a constant desire to take care of the line, to pay attention to diction, to never sing too loud, to let herself be enveloped by the piano, to mark distances, in short, with respect to the genre. operatic.

Leif Ove Andsnes and Lise Davidsen, at the beginning of their recital at the Teatro Real.Javier del Real

The result is technically extraordinary, but not so much emotionally or expressively, in part because, if it can be verbalized in this way, the song prevails or is placed above the text of the poems, which are relegated, as a unit of meaning, to a background. In some cases, Davidsen did manage to better inhabit individual poems and to express their content more spontaneously, as in

, in part thanks to the encouragement provided by Andsnes's exceptional piano performance. Something similar happened in the second and eighth songs of the Grieg cycle, where it was perceived how the tone of the poem had been perfectly internalized and translated with music. In fact,

's last song , the very ambitious

, was the one that marked perhaps the highest performance point of the first part, with an exceptional coda of five measures of the solo piano closed with a chord in a triple

. The cycle had already started with a display of subtlety and precision on the part of Andsnes: the two wide arpeggiated chords, the first trill with resolution and the second followed by a semi-fuzzy scale of more than an octave. It was the pianist who guided Davidsen through the strong contrasts of

at all times , which opens and closes with vivid manifestations of a natural mysticism with a strong Norwegian stamp,

and the aforementioned

.

Alongside one and the other, two intimate psychological portraits (

and

), followed or preceded by two other natural pictures of a carefree nature (

and

), with two love songs as the central axis of the cycle:

and

.

All eyes were on Davidsen, but much of the wonder was born or fostered on or from the piano.

More information

Lise Davidsen outshines everything and everyone in 'Fidelio'

After a very long break (which exceeded the length of the first part), the initial chords —with a strong Wagnerian imprint— of

admirably

touched by Andsnes,

they took us into a completely different poetic and musical world, despite the fact that

and the

of Richard Strauss are practically contemporaries (1895 and 1894). Although it is not frequented, the Grieg-Strauss sequence is entirely natural, since both lived very long marriages with two singers, and Grieg confessed that Nina, his wife, was the “only authentic interpreter” of his songs. Lise Davidsen felt very comfortable in this more chromatic and harmonically tortuous territory, even more so when very soon (in

) it gave her the opportunity to show her perfect highs: an A and a B in which her voice showed its immense quality and its smooth, rich and round timbre. At the end of

, a repeat spectator, located in the first rows of the stalls, once again displayed a very remarkable musical and auditory insensitivity, and insisted on clapping while the last notes of the piano were still playing (and when there was still another

to to close the block dedicated to Richard Strauss), perhaps believing that this would make him worthy of a medal for the fastest applauder. And the worst thing is that, as often happens, at the moment he was seconded by other potential medalists, all determined to award the artists out of time when what they were really doing was disturbing them and, apparently, as could be seen clearly in the face and the attitude of Andsnes, to enervate them.

More than one person must have thought of Kirsten Flagstad's historic recording of the

by Wagner along with pianist Gerald Moore in 1948 before listening to Lise Davidsen. The shadow of her compatriot will always accompany her, naturally: because they cultivate an identical repertoire and because privileged voices such as those whose emerge only very occasionally. The young Norwegian star, however, did not imitate his compatriot, despite the fact that Wagner is, today, his natural territory and where he is called to reap his greatest triumphs. Again it became clear that his approaches to the poems came more from the outside than from the inside: a perfect, immaculate, contained song, but that did not quite delve into the enormous emotional charge of poems and explicitly possessed music. in two cases, by the letter and spirit of

.

There are also, more or less literal, motifs from

,

although it is the two lovers of medieval legend (transmuted into Mathilde Wesendonck and Wagner himself) who squeeze through the cracks of all its bars. .

Davidsen's Isolde will arrive in time (his Elisabeth and Sieglinde allow us to predict the best), as well as his greater deepening and humanization of this music and these verses, in which the text of

also slides , such as happens in

Lise Davidsen demands public applause for the great pianist Leif Ove Andsnes at the end of his recital at the Teatro Real.Javier del Real

Davidsen was more closely related to the two “studies for

”, that is,

and

, which take us, in reverse order, to the third and second acts of the drama. But also here he maintained that seraphic and somewhat distant tone that characterized his recital, far from the inner fire that Kirsten Flagstad knew how to impress on these songs, an Isolde of reference. Also essential in Wagner was the performance of Andsnes, a pianist from whom he should not stray (also as a counselor) who gave uninterrupted displays of his enormous class. At his own Rosendal Festival, a model of camaraderie between musicians from different disciplines, countries and generations, Andsnes acts as a teacher and inspirer of his colleagues and his frequent collaborations with Ian Bostridge were once his master's degree at

so listening to it again in these repertoires was undoubtedly one of the greatest gifts of this recital, crowned by three off-program songs: the inevitable

by Strauss and

and

by Grieg. Everything perfectly coherent.

A short final comment for the subtitles. In those that the Royal Theater projected in its operas, ineffable translations have been read for years: Rusalka was turned last season into a "lunatic" instead of a "lunar" creature. This recital, with the most concise hand program that can be imagined, without even indicating the authors of the poems of the songs, has joined the wagon of nonsense with some cultured pearls that are difficult to forget: when referring to the summer house , or the garden, from which the beloved observes in

Grieg's

the translation mysteriously places it next to a "roundabout"; Goethe refers in

to not wearing or adorning oneself with roses, not to not "wearing" them; and many verbs transformed the singular of the original into a strange plural (in Wagner's

, for example, where “tell me” was read instead of “tell me”), as if they had been translated from English and not from German. It was also surprising that in

de Grieg the original poem by Cristóbal de Castillejo that Emanuel Geibel translated into German was not used (the song is also part

of Hugo Wolf 's

). In the absence of a full-blown handheld program, captions cannot make as many mistakes.

The great Russian pianist Yevgueni Kissin during his recital on Sunday at the National Auditorium.Rafa Martín / Ibermúsica

In October 2017, in adjoining days, Leif Ove Andsnes and Yevgueni Kissin played at the National Auditorium. Chance has repeated the coincidence again, and in the same order, although in this case in theaters and with different genres. Both are almost strict contemporaries (they were born in 1970 and 1971) and, just in their fifties, they are at the zenith of their careers, although in the case of the Russian pianist, with such an early and dazzling start, it is very difficult to know when he will to reach the ceiling, because he seems installed at the top since his adolescence. It is almost impossible to refer to him without incurring an overdose of superlatives, because listening to him play a piano the feelings that he arouses are, above all, amazement and disbelief.

Kissin has decided to dedicate this Madrid recital to what was his first — and only — teacher, Anna Pavlovna Kantor, who died on the verge of being a centennial in July of last year and who went on to become another member of the Russian pianist's family. You have to think that a seed like the one that this prodigious musician treasured inside would have germinated equally in any territory and under the guidance of almost any teacher, but the truth is that Kantor has earned a place in the history of the piano for having guided the steps of this man who, although he has somewhat softened and humanized his gestures and manners since his marriage, continues to look like a being from another planet: just see how he walks, how he greets, how he smiles, to see that he lives in a world different from ours .

His recital opened with a novelty, the famous

usually attributed to Bach, but which can hardly be his work (or, at least, originally written for organ). Kissin's version was decidedly emphatic, although this is probably what Carl Tausig's somewhat bloated, Lisztian transcription claims. Almost at the opposite extreme is the nude

by Mozart, which the Russian genius was parsimoniously reeling from note to note, respecting the repetition of the two sections, which made its only 57 bars lengthen for a quarter of a minute. long hour. Dump on the keyboard, without forcing the

original, it sounded like a sober funeral plant, naked and contained by his teacher. Perhaps its rhetorical elements lacked to highlight a little more, although Kissin did masterfully translate that pre-Chopinian wink of the six-bit fusas of measure 54, thereby tracing a bridge with what would later become the second part of his recital.

On the other hand,

by Beethoven, an author with whom Kissin does not quite show a natural harmony. Something similar happened to him in that 2017 recital, or in a previous one in 2014, where neither the

nor the

allowed us to speak of a born Beethovenian. There is something about the German's music that continues to resist him, not technically, of course, but spiritually. As an execution, everything was the usual paragon of wonders (with just a couple of isolated and inconsequential smudges). As an interpretation, however, the confessional, human tone of this music was lacking, which is not achieved only by extreme slowness of the

, as Kissin did in the first movement, excessively slow and lacking the fluidity and smooth propulsion that his best interpreters know how to give him.

marked passages

did not sound really light (how deceptive and difficult is the falsely ornamental writing of the late Beethoven!) And a majestic tone is not the same as a deep or substantial character. Something similar happened in the

, with impeccable syncopations and setbacks, but again somewhat slower than the music demands and not sufficiently disjointed, as Beethoven seems to claim by way of contrast with the two flanking movements. Much better was the last move, especially the two fugues (

and

), in which that essential combination of logic and fluidity was perceived, as well as a miraculous clarity of voices.

The arios sounded less free and in that sequence of chords, with increasing dynamics, that precede the second fugue, that resistance was once again glimpsed — sometimes slight, much more than that at other times — that the Beethovenian language continues to pose to the Russian pianist.

Yevgueni Kissin appreciates the incessant applause from the audience that filled the National Auditorium.Rafa Martín / Ibermúsica

After another very long intermission, as in the Teatro Real, Kissin faced in the second part of his recital the musician for whom he seems to feel, however, the greatest affinities: it is enough that he plays two, three notes, or a couple of notes. chords, so that everything refers us to Frédéric Chopin. Very few pianists have been able to better translate their music and recreate its complex and multifaceted sensibility with greater richness. From the outset, he took refuge in the intimacy of his mazurkas, neither the best nor the best known, an ascending sequence of seven pieces that ended with one of the most ambitious and complex, op. 33 no. 4. As a final firework, he proposed a first free and poetic reading, and then a powerful and electrifying one, of

by Chopin, an uneven work, somewhat repetitive in its second section, but which allowed Kissin to display all his powers: trills, thirds, fourths, sixths, octaves, arpeggios, cadential points with endless cascades of small ornamental notes. We have heard similar technical displays many other times, but they should not arouse less admiration for that. Playing this work like this, with such a perfect equation between musicality and virtuosity, is something only available to the chosen ones. In the past, maybe just Claudio Arrau. Today, Yevgueni Kissin.

The program had a hidden internal logic, articulated around the publisher Maurice Schlesinger, in whose printing house the works of Tausig, Beethoven and a good part of Chopin initially saw the light. Outside the program, and with the audience that filled the National Auditorium's Symphony Hall fully devoted to the tipping fair, Kissin was also carried away by common sense: the choral prelude

by Bach, this time in the extraordinary transcription by Ferruccio Busoni; the

by Mozart, and the

and the

of Chopin.

The four knew superlative performances, without fatigue having made an apparent dent in the omnimous faculties of the pianist, who returned to give his best in the two pieces of the Polish composer, a soul mate.

Thus ended an exceptional weekend: with the first recital by Lise Davidsen and Leif Ove Andsnes, a couple called to endure, and with the umpteenth manifestation of the genius of Yevgueni Kissin.

But the custom of what is already known should not detract one iota of its exceptionality.