“Late Night” concert with Simon Rattle and Barbara Hannigan
Barbara Hannigan has endeared herself to Berlin audiences on many occasions with her stunning voice, stage presence and taste for bizarre humour. These qualities also come to bear in this Late Night concert with Simon Rattle, in which, among other things, she performs William Walton’s experimental and whimsical Façade in which we see Sir Simon in a very unusual role.
What a programme Sir Simon Rattle, Barbara Hannigan and members of the Berliner Philharmoniker have assembled for this Late Night: naughty, sophisticated, sexy and subversive – in the spirit of Stravinsky and Weill, but also very British. William Walton’s 1923 “entertainment” Façade, on texts by his notorious friend and patroness Edith Sitwell, brought him overnight the reputation – deservedly – of an enfant terrible of modern English music.
Such an audacious combination of academic, popular, cabaret and jazz musical idioms was new to London. And performances of this high-spirited entertainment – a gem of musical humour too seldom heard in Germany – still have an astonishing power to set toes tapping, to elicit unexpected smiles and, at attempts at orientation, to twist the listener’s mind into a happily convoluted maze!
No less witty is Paul Hindemith’s roughly contemporaneous Kammermusik No. 1. Chamber musical stuffiness? Hardly! The “Roaring Twenties” invaded Berlin with a vengeance and even cast its spell on a composer like Hindemith. Rounding off this Late Night is Hans Werner Henze’s cantata Being Beauteous on a poem by Arthur Rimbaud. The scoring of the work alone is spectacular (coloratura soprano, harp, four cellos) – even more so, what Henze makes of it.
Sir Simon Rattle
Members of the Berliner Philharmoniker
Barbara Hannigan
© 2012 Berlin Phil Media GmbH
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