Royal Albert Hall
Ravel – Ma Mère L’Oye: Suite
Auerbach – The Infant Minstrel and his Peculiar Menagerie (Symphony no.3 for violin, choir, and orchestra) (BBC
co-commission: UK premiere)Debussy (orch. Jean Roger-Ducasse) – King Lear: ‘Fanfare d’ouverture’ and ‘Le Sommeil de Lear’
Debussy – La Mer
Vadim Gluzman (violin)
Nina Bennett, Helen Reeves (sopranos)
Andrew Watts (counter-tenor)
Tom Raskin (tenor)
Andrew Rupp (bass)
Crouch End Festival Chorus (chorus master: David Temple)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Edward Gardner (conductor)
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| (L-R) Chorus-master of the Crouch End Festival Chorus
David Temple, composer Lera Auerbach, violinist Vadim
Gluzman and conductor Edward Gardner Image: Chris Christodoulou/BBC Proms |
The performance of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite with which this Prom
opened was for me its highlight. Friends with whom I spoke at the interval
found it on the slow side; for me, it was perfectly judged. The opening ‘Pavane
de la Belle au bois dormant’ showed a beautifully measured tread. Its
silky-smooth textures – what wonderful playing from the BBC SO under Edward
Gardner! – continued into ‘Petit Poucet’, its chaste, or maybe not-so-chaste,
passion impossible to resist, especially with such ravishing woodwind solos as
heard here. ‘Laideronnette’, Impératrice des pagodes’ sounded more urgent than
usual, rather winningly so. I was reminded of the ‘laid’ in ‘Laideronnette’,
but not too much. Colourful contrast came in ‘Les Entretiens de la Belle et de
la Bête’: faux-naïve magic! The grave nobility of ‘Le Jardin féerique’, not, of
course, without its own sensuality, had me wish that we could have heard the
whole ballet.
At the close, a woman seated
behind me asked the man with her, ‘Was that the modern piece? Have we got that
over with now?’ The irony would prove to be that, by comparison, with Lera
Auerbach’s new work, The Infant Minstrel
and his Peculiar Menagerie, it most certainly was, in all but date. What on
earth was the BBC doing co-commissioning such drivel? It was excellently
performed, insofar as I could tell, the vocal soloists and Crouch End Festival
Chorus singing lustily, even amusingly. Gardner and the orchestra proved
equally committed, and a gold medal should go to Vadim Gluzman, whose violin
solo (the line of the Infant Minstrel) proved unerringly beautiful of tone and
sure of direction. Would that we could have heard him in something more
substantial.
The programme certainly did not
undersell Auerbach, her fellow poet, Thomas McCarthy writing of her as ‘an
artist for whom music is as wide as exile and as intimate as a line of poetry’,
and Scene Magazine quoted thus: ‘To
say Lera Auerbach is a Renaissance artist is a bit like saying Leonardo da
Vinci could multitask a little bit. Most impressive is the totality of her
immense body of work.’ I cannot comment on ‘the totality’, but can say that her
middling English verse, or rather that of ‘Erroneous Anonymous’, its debts to
Lewis Carroll a little too obvious, was never remotely matched by her derivative,
frankly uninspired music. The Overture’s violin solo swiftly invites, or is
gatecrashed by, countertenor, soprano, and, mostly, the chorus. There are some
reasonably attractive sounds akin to watered-down Szymanowski, but not much
else to enjoy in this neo-tonal rambling. The rest is mostly verbal, and I can
imagine a child enjoying an edited version of the verse alone, although there
is a little sub-Piazzolla writing in an Interlude too; Gluzman and Gardner
provided a splendid lilt to the dance rhythms, perhaps more than they deserved.
By the time we had reached the fourth number, ‘Lament for a Common Corporant’, and
Andrew Watts was informing us of the said corporant – ‘Who likes to rant, to
rant, to rant! He rants on all day long! (And it’s a very boring song.)’ – I
could only agree, its laboured whimsy notwithstanding.
The four-square word-setting is
throughout so obvious, so predictable, that it might have come from a reasonably
talented schoolchild: excellent in that case, but as a concert work lasting the
best part of three quarters of an hour? Even the open goal of a dig at Donald
Trump – ‘I had a little husband, no bigger than my thumb. Didn’t know what to
call him, so I called him Donald Trump’ – went for relatively little, and that
was not the fault of the performers. I hoped that ‘Guacamole Treatment’ might
bring a Peter Mandelson reference, but no, although the vocal line is at times
slightly less predictable. As for the tedious, well-nigh interminable
sentimentalism of the final number, ‘Child-Wanderer’, once we were through its non-ironically
cloying harmonies, I could only repeat once again – for it had already been
repeated a few too many times on stage – its final line: ‘Infant Minstrel, are
you real?’
The Debussy of the second half
never rose to the heights of the Ravel performance. It was difficult to put my
finger on why, but mystery was lacking. Perhaps it was not a surprise, then,
that it was the brief Fanfare from the King
Lear music that came off best: forthright, yet not without a little of the
languor largely missing elsewhere. Lear’s Dream sounded attractive enough, but
inconsequential. La Mer had plenty of
drive, and often welcome clarity – although one would hear far more in, say, a
Boulez performance of old. Motivic development, in ‘De l’Aube à midi sur la mer’
was admirably clear, yet in Debussy, one needs to experience the magic with
which clarity and ambiguity are revealed to be two sides of the same mystical
coin. That first movement’s great climax fell oddly flat, Gardner’s pacing
seemingly awry. Orchestral balances proved problematical in ‘Jeux de vagues’,
brass too often overpowering the strings. There was a splendid sense of the elemental
to ‘Dialogues du vent et de la mer’; thereafter, however, the dialogues’
progress was disconcertingly disjointed. Maybe we should have been better off
with more, or all, Ravel.
