Mahler Players' sublime night of Wagner's Tristan Und Isolde stirs the emotions
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REVIEW
Wagner’s Tristan Und Isolde Act 2
Mahler Players
Inverness Cathedral
5 stars
I WAS hardly breathing by the time The Mahler Players and their five exceptional soloists brought their audience to the end of the intense drama of forbidden love and betrayal, Tristan Und Isolde, Richard Wagner’s opera – or ‘music drama’ as the composer might have preferred.
And the words and performance by Scottish soprano Lee Bisset in the Liebestod (‘love death’) that ended the opera and the night of music with her fevered ecstasy of love was so moving that possibly, like at least one other in the audience I know of, you were left wiping away tears – or fighting them back – as you tried to regain control before the applause ended and left you dealing with ordinary, mundane life again.
At both Inverness Cathedral on Saturday and Strathpeffer Pavilion on Sunday, the prelude to Act One of Tristan Und Isolde, the whole of Act Two, the opening to Act Three and the final Liebestod of the opera were presented by the Players and five soloists – Peter Wedd as Tristan, Sir John Tomlinson as King Marke, Lee Bisset as Isolde, Brangane by Laura Margaret Smith (replacing an unwell Alwyn Mellor) and Frederick Jones as Melot.
Until The Mahler Players started occasionally bringing in the odd bit of Wagner to their programmes, probably like many of my generation, I shunned the composer. Knowing Adolf Hitler was a fan made you wary and possibly one too many heavy-handed TV jokes about large ladies in horned helmets didn’t help.
But the Players’ founder, music director and conductor Tomas Leakey, the chamber orchestra and hand-picked solo voices have prepared the way, coaxed you to think again – and really listen.
In 2017 the ensemble presented Parsifal: An Orchestral Fantasy, highlights of Wagner’s last opera, the music apart from the Overture, not heard in the Highlands before, the Players believe. Then in 2019, the first act of Die Walkure was performed as a “Highland premiere” in Elgin, Ullapool and at Inverness Cathedral with one of the soloists Peter Wedd, who played Tristan on Saturday night.
That orchestration, like Saturday’s was created by composers Matthew King and Peter Longworth – King going on to create Wagner In Venice: A Symphony, which brings together some of the composer’s late sketches, and presents Wagner “not… as the famous composer of operas but as a radical composer of symphonies”.
As well as presenting the world premiere in concert in 2021 – a triumphant live return after lockdown – The Mahler Players created their first recording, Richard Wagner In Venice on CD.
The opera prelude begins with the cellos and the famous ‘Tristan chord’ – harmonically unresolved and supposedly leaving the audience awaiting “the eventual cathartic moment”, as expert Anthony Friend put it in the programme.
The musicians brought all the sensitivity and power to create the drama Wagner gifted them, super-responsive to the direction of conductor Tomas Leakey.
Emotional pull, sublime music and the quality of the voices of the soloists was crowned by the dramatic interpretation of the characters – Sir John Tomlinson as the wronged King Marke, noticeably had puzzlement and the pain of betrayal moving across his face long before he sang a note.
And you couldn't fail to be moved by the grief, nor the sense of incandescent love to the point of befuddled senses of sight and sound and scent expressed in Wagner's poetic lyrics.
Isolde sings: "Am I the only one who hears this tune, so joyful... sounding still clearer, drifting about me, are they waves of gentle breezes? are they chords? shall I breathe them? shall I hear them?... the great wave of the world's breath, to drown in, to sink unconscious."
Love bordering on madness, Wagner's superpassions were devastatingly expressed by Lee Bisset and the Mahler Players in this unforgettable performance.
