Dvořák Hall, Rudolfinum
Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Jan Kučera: Double Concerto for violin and cello (world premiere)
Schulhoff: Symphony no.1, op.50
Ravel: Boléro
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| Images: (c) Dvořákova Praha |
Founded at the dawn of the wireless age in 1926 as the twenty-strong Radiojournal Orchestra, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra (Symfonický orchestr Českého rozhlasu) will celebrate its centenary throughout the coming season. A little later this month, that season’s opening concert will recreate its opening programme, offering music by Smetana, Beethoven, Dvořak, and Fibich. As a prelude, this concert, part of the Dvořák Prague International Music Festival (Dvořákova Praha), welcomed its new chief conductor and artistic director Elias Grandy and renewed its record in new music, then and now, Czech and otherwise, albeit with somewhat unexpected results.
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune has often been claimed as the dawn of modern music. It depends, of course, what one means – even the Bible has two creation stories – but Debussy’s softly subversive tone-poem has as good a claim as any—and was not three decades old when Josef/Jožka Charvat, a pupil of Janáček lifted his baton for that first concert. The performance’s mood was felt in its opening flute solo, which lightly yet unmistakeably infected the orchestra, or so it seemed. I mean no disrespect to Grandy when I say it is better not to pay too much attention to the conductor’s workings here, especially one so outwardly demonstrative, but crucially it did not feel over-conducted. At any rate, due languor – that inescapable word here – was elicited, with outstanding playing here and elsewhere from the orchestra, its warmth just the faunish thing, subsequent arabesques suggestive and provocative. Tristan und Isolde was in the air, but it was also a memory—like the faun’s amorous escapades, imaginary or real. Harps told us much, as did crotales. Time was almost up for a magical, deceptively light opening that left one wanting more.
The world premiere of Jan Kučerá’s Double Concerto for violin and cello was a more puzzling affair: not only in relative but more-or-less absolute terms the least advanced work in musical language, form, and much else, of the four on offer, though all but a century newer than the latest (Ravel’s Boléro). Does that matter? Not necessarily, though we are not talking about Webern or Varèse here. What concerned me more was an almost televisual sectionalism to the outward movements, suggesting they might accompany a broadcast we could not see and without which they did not, at least to my ears, make a great deal of sense. The first of three movements opened promisingly enough, with a cello solo as Romantic cry de profundis from Sakura Toba, soon joined in violin-cello duet by the similarly excellent Daniel Matejča, both soloists collaborating well in what soon became rather jolly. It was not exactly ‘like’ Prokofiev, but there was a good deal of ‘side-slipping’ and, at its best a welcome sense of theatricality. Continuing in neo-Romantic vein, it was for the most part well-fashioned, but the agglomerative sense, without much in the way of transition, of section after section here and in the finale soon began to pall. The central slow movement, a lullaby, cohered better, its opening suggesting something darker, a little more adventurous, although unabashedly tonal: more in texture, then, than in harmony. Its melodic thread had just enough elements of unpredictability to hold one’s attention. A fiddling rondo theme announced the third movement, thereafter shared with cello, provoking a more lyrical response: very much what one might have expected, prior to a puzzling, once again ‘Russian’ waltz interlude and double cadenza. The piece received an enthusiastic reception, however nonplussed I may have been.
Erwin Schulhoff’s 1925 First Symphony packed, by contrast, quite a punch: perhaps not entirely successful, but largely so and always intriguing. This was new music to me in the most straightforward sense. Its first movement was haunted by pentatonicism and by Stravinsky—but perhaps not the Stravinsky one might have expected, that of Le Rossignol. Schulhoff here was already assured enough to engage in Stravinskian theft from the master himself, thereafter to proceed along a different, Neue Sachlichkeit path. Rhythm and harmonic rhythm evinced theatricality, but as a view from the concert hall. Was that Debussy’s Prélude in the air of the second of three movements, an ‘Andante con moto’? If not, programming and performance cunningly suggested it, alongside darker, Berg-like material in which the Prague strings truly excelled. This is how to do allusion—and illusion. Grandy shaped its progress well without undue moulding, likewise in a finale that intensified many of these tendencies in an assured, committed performance.
Boléro did its thing, resonating with invigorating splendour and
clarity in the main hall of the Rudolfinum. Solo spots brought, in context,
reminiscence of other works: flute, naturally, with Debussy and bassoon with
Schulhoff. But Ravel’s piece was only ever itself in a reading that built in
carefully constructed colour. Each of the soloists clearly enjoyed their moment,
none more so than the trombonist. My sole cavil was the way Grandy pulled
around, even mauled, the close. Yes, there must be, can hardly not be, a
wrench, but that comes of itself. It was a pity, but not enough to undo an otherwise
fine performance and concert.