PBO Presents Valentine’s Day Programming

This morning the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale (PBO) presented the latest installment in its Live from Amsterdam series hosted by Music Director Richard Egarr. The title of the program was, appropriately enough, Valentine’s Day Edition. The program was recorded at the Schulkerk De Hoop, which is located away from the center of Amsterdam and offered a suitably modest performance space. It also offered a baby grand piano for Egarr to play (which was also relatively modest in nature).

Mezzo Barbara Kozelj (courtesy of PBO)

The guest artist for this performance was Barbara Kozelj, who performed song cycles from two decidedly different periods in music history. The program begin with Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XXVIb/2 cantata Arianna a Naxos, which he composed relatively late in life in 1790. The concluding selection was Robert Schumann’s Opus 42 Frauenliebe und Leben, composed in his “year of song,” 1840. Between these two selections Egarr was joined at the keyboard by Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya to perform a four-hand arrangement of the Adagietto movement from Gustav Mahler’s fifth symphony, which was prepared by Otto Singer, Jr.

Current scholarly opinion supports the assertion that Mahler composed this movement as a love letter to Alma Schindler as a courtship gesture. This is one of his most intimate creations, scored for only the string section and a solo harp. It allows the listener to catch his/her breath after the intense turbulence of the first three movements and the almost violently aggressive polyphony of the concluding rondo movement. Four hands on an aging baby grand can hardly do justice to the subtleties of the original version, but the camera angle that caught the matching wedding rings of the two pianists definitely captured the spirit of Valentine’s Day.

Schumann’s title addresses both love and life. It begins with the stirrings of love, follows the heroine to her wedding ceremony, the marital bed, and the birth of a child. Unfortunately, the cycle of poems by Adelbert von Chamisso then drops the reader/listener off a cliff by killing the husband, leaving the protagonist to sing of her lost happiness (verlornes Glück). In Haydn’s cantata, on the other hand, happiness has already been lost with Theseus leaving Ariadne abandoned on the isle of Naxos (and without any of the entertainment that Richard Strauss would later provide for her). Fortunately, Kozelj’s rich mezzo voice could not have done better justice to either of these composers, even if the narratives had little to do with the spirit of Valentine’s Day.