The bass endures to the end, despite all the catastrophes that happen around it, which increasingly attack, disintegrate and maltreat even the melody fragments. The First World War participant Maurice Ravel wrote “La valse” in 1920, a dance of death phantasmagoria that increasingly descends into a grotesque madness that seems to have sprung from ETA Hoffmann’s fantasy, which was prone to such spooks. Yes, there is war in Europe again. But Ravel, who had survived one of the worst, was composing 100 years ago, sure that culture and society – the waltz is the ballroom dance par excellence – will survive. And so Vladimir Jurowski conducts “La valse” in the Munich National Theater, full of terror and played by his state orchestra as a virtuoso sound magic web.
The evening begins under the sign of the Ukraine war, the colors light blue and yellow shine over the orchestra. Jurowski conducts at the beginning, he did it a week ago in Berlin, the romantic and pathetic national anthem of Ukraine, pretty much everyone gets up, then he speaks. Jurowski was born in Moscow in 1972, studied in Germany, worked for a long time in England, has been music director of the Bavarian State Opera since this season and has often criticized Vladimir Putin. That evening Jurowski is visibly and audibly agitated by the war he is waging, he calls it a most brutal attack, speaks of the refugees and quotes the beginning of the 1862 anthem (“Glory and freedom of the Ukraine have not yet died”). Yurovsky calls Putin insane and a dictator who is committing genocide not only against Ukrainians but also against his young soldiers.
After an impassioned speech against the war in Ukraine, Yurovsky returned to music.
(Photo: Lino Mirgeler/picture alliance/dpa)
This is a flaming political speech, but Jurowski finds the link to music, to Ravel’s anti-war piece “La valse”, but also to Benjamin Britten’s “Sinfonia da Requiem”, an outcry against militarism written under the impression of the Second World War unleashed by Nazi Germany, Jurowski wants to recognize a prayer for peace in the consolation-struggling final sentence, a “Dona nobis pacem”. Nevertheless, the stormy march in the middle movement is the most gripping for him.
Britten’s “Illuminations” are rarely performed – and never so filigree
Jurowski is also a master of sophisticated webs, which he, the suite from Claude Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande” shows, transforms into an orgy of tonal colors with intensity and elegance. Yes, improvements are always possible with this conductor. With the “Illuminations”, composed by Britten shortly before the “Sinfonia da Requiem”, Jurowski and his wonderful soprano Sabine Devieilhe enter the heart of high culture. The nine-part piece, which is rarely heard and never performed in such a filigree and harmonious way, sets poems from Arthur Rimbaud’s book of the same name, which not only tempts the surrealists to praise it, to music. The result is luminous fragments of an enigmatic experience of the world, which Britten sets to music lightly and far from Rimbaud’s hermeticism, which is definitely good for the texts.
The performance is full of miracles. The biggest thing happens when Sabine Devieilhe sings “et je danse” (and I dance) and effortlessly leads her radiantly pure voice to an extremely high B flat, which she takes, as required, on the border of inaudibility and also completely calmly. Here music turns into a paradise, into a ringing promise of salvation which, it is a paradox, quietly and calmly screams against all destruction and all inhumanity.