On the evidence of my lunchtime concert attendance in Portsmouth, Chichester and Winchester Cathedrals, and St. Martin-in-the-Fields, it's probably fair to say that Winchester is the classiest. It does cost to get into the cathedral but the ticket lasts for a year so I was glad to find the ticket from last September was still in date. But it would still have been worth it without such minor parsimonious considerations.
Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs are an unlikely favourite of mine, being so late Romantic. So late that it was 1948 when they were written and then published together opus posthumous so that Strauss didn't even know they would become such a set. You have to wonder where a programme that begins with such a sumptuous farewell of sunsets and dying embers will lead but first of all is Claire Rutter's passionate, powerful to tender, operatic account of this monumental leavetaking, which for me is not only that of Richard Strauss but one plaintive last shudder from Romanticism itself although I realize that any number of other artists will have been identified as 'the last Romantic'.
It is glorious, and Claire makes good use of the large acoustic in Winchester but one is constantly aware of accompanist, Paul Turner, making the piano play the part of the whole orchestra here in pieces which are as much about the orchestration as the singing. I doubt if it's possible to capture exactly what the orchestra does in Im Abendrot but it would still be underestimating Paul's contribution to call him simply 'the accompanist'.
There would have been nowhere else in the world I'd rather have been during that performance on a Tuesday lunchtime, which is a feeling I sometimes get on special occasions. It is magnificent music and more than justified the trip to be there for it.
But where the programme next took us was to a darker place, the Vier ernste Gesange (Four Serious Songs) by Brahms. I'm not sure if 'serious' would be the best translation in our post-ironic age. Everything was serious for late Romantics and I doubt if they needed to point it out. But my German is never going to be sufficient to say if ernste should be 'profound' or even 'fatalistic', given that we can already hear 'earnest' in English. The baritone, Stephen Gadd, for anybody who didn't know (like me) is Mr. Claire Rutter and he filled the cathedral similarly with his voice except from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Four songs written, like those of Strauss, in the year before he died, don't have the same sensual resignation or acceptance. The first is funereal, the third (O Tod, wie bitter dist du) in particular is angrier.
Not surprisingly, the German for 'swansong' is 'schwanengesang' and I'm not sure if I prefer it but Brahms is less enamoured of the soaring potential of these fragments that we might shore against our ruin which gave Stephen every reason to, as he said, 'put on his serious face' and give a resonant performance of these songs that sounded more structured, as in repeated verse forms, than the Strauss did.
And then the couple ended with two duets by Robert Schumann, the Tanzlied in particular offering some respite from thoughts of mortality with lively interplay and some pronounced enunciation from Claire. It makes it tempting to explore the repertoire of C19th German lieder further but when one also has Ska, Northern Soul, the Complete Works of Buxtehude, the symphonies of James MacMillan and so many other areas on some vague 'to do' list, I don't know when it's going to happen.
But Claire and Stephen came back to do Bess, You Is My Woman Now as a contrasting encore, by now having taken me so convincingly out of my comfort zone that I readily enjoyed one of my less favourite composers.
Winchester excelled itself today with young ladies genteel enough to have come from the pages of Jane Austen always on hand in museums, the Great Hall and their gift shops to make sure you made the most of what is there. Jane herself is there, some way from the mortuary chests of Canute, William Rufus and Ethelwulf. Apparently those graves are being investigated to see if their evidence establishes that the site was used as the last resting place of the English kings of the period. And, what do you think the answer to that is likely to be. No?
I asked the guide about the painting at the altar in front of the high altar in front of the tremedous detail of the C15th screen. He said, 'the tapestry?' I said, 'no, the painting. The wave on a background of dark red.'
He said it was a tapestry. I hadn't got close enough. But I was redeemed, as one would hope to be in such a place, by asking if it was by Maggi Hambling.
Well spotted, he said.
Well, she does paint a lot of waves. It's just that I've not seen one before in that colour.
The attendance in Winchester looked less than they get in Chichester which might be to do with the entrance charge but if one lived in the area, the year's ticket would be as nothing if you could make a few of these concerts. There is a performance of Pictures At An Exhibition forthcoming.
Get there if you can.