Royal Albert Hall
Birtwistle: Earth Dances
Beethoven: Symphony no.3 in E-flat major, op.55, ‘Eroica’
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
This was a strangely disappointing Prom, which promised much in programming, received excellent playing from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and yet was somewhat let down in the first half, rather more than that in the second, by Ryan Wigglesworth’s conducting. Birtwistle and Beethoven offer in many ways an excellent pairing: much in common, not least aspects of temperament, an indomitability of what we might still cling to as embodying human spirit, and much that contrasts too. The goal-orientation that Birtwistle often – not always, and not always fully – eschewed is unquestionably central to Beethoven’s music, nowhere more so than in the ‘middle period’ more or less inaugurated by his Eroica Symphony. By the same token, the importance of continuity, no matter what the obstacles, remains crucial to both. Birtwistle himself pointed to the ‘wonderful example’ of Beethoven in ‘order or disruption of order’: ‘He never does what you think he is going to do. The surprise is perpetual.’
We could have done with more surprise on this occasion, in both halves, though Earth Dances fared better. I should not be unduly harsh about what was in many ways a fine performance. Wigglesworth conducted The Minotaur at Covent Garden twelve years ago: very well, I thought, though I see now that I noted a certain ‘Classicism’ to his approach, which might be read in more than one way. Here, that translated, if indeed it were a similar thing at all, into apparent reluctance, doubtless furthered by the Royal Albert Hall’s cavernous acoustic, to let the music have its head. Clarity of detail was admirable and the performance was not without cragginess, but it came perilously close to drifting at times, especially during softer, slower passages. That said, there was a proper sense of the primordial at the beginning, of an aural landscape that had both always been and yet was anything but constant. It is difficult not to summon up some sort of images here, but the grit remained, as it should, in the music ‘itself’ and its tectonics, its dances not balletic but rather stratified and hieratic successors to Stravinsky’s Rite via Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Brute force and melancholy emerged as near-dialectical opposing forces in a world that lay beyond good and evil, a world that might be that of Nature yet is surely not only so. The performance was strongest when its dances registered as such, when fractures opened, volcanoes erupted; sometimes, though, it would have benefited from a stronger, not necessarily more interventionist but more determined (even Beethovenian) hand in having them do so. A due sense of return, not complete, not merely cyclical, proved nevertheless necessary and palpable at the close.
The ecstatic reception accorded the Eroica in the hall bewildered me. To my ears, it never so much as stirred, at most skimming the surface in a performance that, to quote Dorothy Parker, ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. Put another way, it moved from an amiable first movement to a merely inconsequential finale, with only a hint of something more interesting in a Funeral March that disintegrated into something approaching stream of consciousness. It felt long, although it was probably on the quick side. (The two tend to go together, whatever metronome enthusiasts may tell you.) The first movement was certainly Allegro, arguably more than that, though brio was more or less entirely absent. It was less Bonaparte, let alone the memory of a great man, than Petit Trianon—with apologies to Marie Antoinette, in reality a far more interesting figure than that might imply. It had line, though scant sense of harmony, with a little more ib the way of temperament as time went on. Sadly, though, it was a matter of too little, too late.
The second movement opened with greater
promise. Although on the swift side, it was not unreasonably so; one sensed
both greater character and more appropriate character. It was hardly granitic, yet
there was nonetheless a darkness emerging from instrumental timbre without
being limited to it. The turn to the major was odd, by turns tentative and
insistent. Without a stronger – much stronger – sense of harmony, it all
sounded rather episodic and empty. If designer Beethoven were your thing, the
scherzo might have been it: sleek and, if not quite empty, little more than blithe.
Exquisite horn playing notwithstanding, the trio offered little in the way of
contrast. The finale offered a disjunct if pretty set of variations, with little
in the way of humour, defiance, exultancy, anything Beethovenian. If ever there
were a time in which our world needed to hear from the symphonic Beethoven, it
would be now. Alas, he seems more distant than ever.
