Great Hall, Blackheath Halls
Elgar - Symphony no.1 in A-flat major,
op.55
Members of the WNO Orchestra
have been joining young players at the Royal Welsh College of Drama, Birmingham
Conservatoire, and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, for ‘side-by-side’
mentoring, rehearsals, and performances. In a welcome note to the programme,
Trinity Laban’s Head of Orchestral Studies explained: ‘Not only then, are the
students encouraged and trained to play to the highest professional level, but
they also experience the focus and discipline required to prepare a performance
in limited rehearsal time – again a crucial discipline for the aspiring
professional orchestral musician.’ The results, under Trinity Laban’s Sir
Charles Mackerras Fellow in Conducting, George Jackson, were impressive indeed.
Impressive and moving.
The excellent Blackheath acoustic
helped to bring out both the warmth and immediacy in the orchestral playing. If
the lamps were going out all over Europe at the opening of the first movement, there
was strength too. The transition to the second group and the character of its
material were smoothly, dramatically handled. Disintegrative tendencies – particularly
in the brass earlier on, but later also in some beautifully dissolving string
lines – were present but not exaggerated. Jackson imparted a strong sense of
line throughout; there was no doubt that he knew where the music was heading,
nor of his ability to communicate that to his players and to the audience. The
timpanist’s underpinning of the dramatic trajectory often proved especially
telling.
The scherzo was just as alert
dramatically – drama, an idea to which I kept returning – as it was
rhythmically. (There is no real distinction, of course.) Darkness was of a kind
familiar from Elgar’s own no-nonsense approach to the score. The trio, tonally
distant, sounded outwardly different, at least to begin with, but underlying
unease remained, indeed mounted. The slow movement was in that respect not dissimilar,
albeit with the ordering, as it were, reversed. There was a songful quality to
this Adagio: certainly not on the
slow side, but nor was it ever harried. Occasional passages of thinner string
sound were to be heard, but such a cavil – almost my only one – should not be
taken too seriously, for there were many more passages of noble passion.
The Lento opening to the finale was unmistakeable in its sense of
darkness, even malevolence, such as at least to match what had gone before. ‘What
had gone before’ was of course to be heard in thematic reminiscence, arguably
more than mere ‘reminiscence’. Elgar’s practice here inevitably brought to mind
some of his greatest symphonic predecessors, not least Beethoven in the Ninth
Symphony, albeit with the crucial caveat of there being no vocal entry, with
all that that entails (or does not). There is much more to the movement than
that, of course, but there was a heavy load to be borne. Elgar offers no fixed
boundary here between past and present; nor did the performance, whose
flexibility, even protean quality, greatly enhanced its capacity to move. The
final peroration, if one can call it that, was as equivocal as many of its
Mahlerian counterparts.
