Hall One, Kings Place
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| Images: Nick Rutter |
Mozart – Piano Concerto no.6 in B-flat major, KV 238
Liszt – Années de pèlerinage: Première année: ‘Suisse’, S 160: ‘Le Mal du pays’
Mozart – Piano Concerto no.5 in D major, KV 175
Mendelssohn – Symphony no.4 in A major, op.90, ‘Italian’
Thomas Gould (violin)
Cédric Tiberghien (piano)
Aurora Orchestra
Nicholas Collon (conductor)
Taking as its theme the touring
programmes of musical prodigies, this instalment in the Aurora Orchestra’s
five-year traversal of Mozart’s piano concerto, opened with the fifth of
Paganini’s Twenty-four Caprices. It
was well played indeed by Thomas Gould, intonation spot on, and with plenty of
rhythmic impetus. Whether it really added to the programme, I am less
convinced, but it did not harm in lieu of an overture.
Cédric Tiberghien took centre
stage for the rest of the first half, with excellent results. First up was the
lovely, shamefully neglected Sixth Piano Concerto. (Just because Mozart wrote
greater concertos, there is no reason for us to forget his earlier works, which
put most other composers to shame. The same goes for his operas.) A warm,
lively orchestral tutti from the
orchestra and Nicholas Collon was answered by Tiberghien with charm and
precision, the first movement as a whole receiving a variegated performance, in
the spirit of forerunners such as JC Bach, yet also looking forward to Mozart’s
later works. Passagework as clean, well-oiled, and, just as important,
melodically meaningful. The slow movement had the air of a Salzburg serenade,
not least on account of its pizzicato strings, but not only on their account. In
its way, this is quite a complicated movement, overtly so: it has little of the
distilled simplicity of the later Mozart. Tiberghien cared for the cantilena
just as much as he would have done in Chopin or Ravel – and rightly so. The
finale was played with good nature, and a sense of fun, whilst still being
taken seriously. There was something of Haydn (if only to our retrospectively
attuned ears) to it, but equally a sense of drama that was entirely Mozart’s
own.
Liszt’s Le Mal du pays offered a very different standpoint on the
travelling virtuoso’s experience. The starkness of its opening seemed already
to look forward to the visionary works of the composer’s old age. Tiberghien
showed himself finely attuned to Liszt’s rhetoric but also to the sentiments
that underlay the rhetoric. Like Liszt himself, he understood the ability of
the piano to ‘speak’ and communicated that. Sadness, even bitterness, made for
a poignant, pungent interlude. Once again, we were reminded that no one, not
even Mozart or Beethoven, did more to make the modern piano and modern pianism
what they are.
Mozart’s Fifth Piano Concerto
opened with the unmistakeable celebratory fizz of the composer in D major.
Collon drove the music quite hard, but it could take it. Tiberghien responded
in similarly ‘public’ fashion. That is not to say his performance lacked
subtlety, quite the contrary; melodic lines were just as finely crafted as in
the previous concerto. Mozart’s surprises registered as they should. Attention
to detail from all concerned ensured that music which, in lesser hands, might
sound ‘conventional’, emerged as anything but. The orchestra, moreover, sounded
as if it were enjoying itself: always a good thing. There was an engaging
physicality here and elsewhere to its performances. The slow movement’s
performance was eloquent. What again can actually prove quite complicated never
sounded fussy; it was well directed, imbued with grace, yet with a place too
for rhetorical flourishes. In the finale, we experienced a return to, even
intensification of, D major extroversion. Display, as previously, was always
musically grounded; the ebullience was impossible not to like. Mozart’s
extraordinary achievement at the age of seventeen blazed in all its glory.
For the second half, we heard a
symphony by another celebrated prodigy, Mendelssohn. Collon offered a
performance rather in the spirit of his Mozart: colourful, exuberant, full of
life. The second group in the first movement had charm too: Mendelssohn should
never grimace; nor did he. The development section, moreover, sounded properly
cumulative. At the opening of the second movement, Collon and his orchestra
seemed keen to highlight Mendelssohn’s interest in Baroque music, Handel as
much as Bach. It was not a dogmatic reading, though: there was plenty of ‘Romantic’
colour to come, not least from the Aurora woodwind. Darkness of mood, far from
unrelieved, provided a welcome correction to many other accounts. The Minuet
charmed, yet never sounded merely placid; there was much to occupy mind and
senses beneath the veneer. Its trio proved just as ambiguous, if differently
so. A fast and furious finale stood out for the intensity of the orchestral
playing. One truly felt the virtues of a chamber orchestra ‘playing out’, of
virtuosic instrumentalists coming together to make music.
