Mezzo-soprano ‘a chance missed’
Anne Sofie von Otter with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Northey, Michael Fowler Centre, March 15
The celebrated Swedish mezzosoprano Anne Sofie von Otter was here in 2011 giving us some lovely singing with Orchestra Wellington in the Town Hall.
But, sumptuous as her singing of some of the Songs of the Auvergne was then, one was left wishing for something a little more substantial, and I felt somewhat the same after this concert, part of the New Zealand Festival at Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre.
Von Otter is a superlative artist, but not one given to display for its own sake, and her selection of six Schubert songs - one an encore - and one Schubert aria was distinguished by singing of great subtlety, and the orchestral arrangements, mostly by Max Reger, had a certain interest. And, of course, the Schubert songs - a brief taste of one of Western music’s great legacies - are superb but they were so soon over that I felt that this was a chance missed.
And that was particularly the case as the second half was devoted to an orchestral work unrelated to Schubert - Alexander Zemlinsky’s The Mermaid.
Zemlinsky was a composer of late German romantic opulence but The Mermaid, a sprawling piece, is not one of his finer works the string quartets and the Sinfonietta are better - but his scoring tests an orchestra.
The NZSO have played and recorded the work with James Judd and certainly showed it in its finest light under the knowing baton of Benjamin Northey.
But, at concert’s end I was left with the feeling that I would have liked a little more Anne Sofie von Otter and a little less Zemlinsky.