Barbican Hall
Also sprach Zarathustra, op.30
Metamorphosen
Der Rosenkavalier – Suite (1945)
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Mariss Jansons (conductor)
I fear that I am about to be grossly unfair, so shall at least try to explain why I am being unfair, or at least grumpy. By all but the most exalted standards, and I suspect that many would say even by exalted standards, this was a fine concert, featuring one of the world’s greatest orchestras and one of the world’s most esteemed living conductors in music which they performed very well indeed. Had this been a run-of-the-mill orchestra, directed by a Kapellmeister-ish sort, I should doubtless have rushed for superlatives. However, that was not who was performing, and I felt just a little disappointed, at least for two of the three items.
Also sprach Zarathustra does not seem to be performed as often as one might expect. I am not entirely sure why. Though I am far from considering it to be Strauss’s finest symphonic poem – if pushed, I should probably opt for Tod und Verklärung – I should have expected it, for a variety of reasons, some good, some less so, to be popular with audiences. Maybe it is, and is less popular with conductors; it is certainly a very difficult work to bring off convincingly. There was nothing really for which I could fault the Concertgebouw Orchestra; its cultivated yet sumptuous sound suits Strauss very well, even if I might long for something a little more closer to Dresden or Vienna. And the feeble organ is a general Barbican curse. (Even for musical obsessives, there would surely be many more pressing cases concerning which one might wish to purloin funds-cum-compensation from the Corporation of London. But it would be a nice gesture all the same, were the hall to be granted a decent example of the King of Instruments instead of having to rely upon a terrible little electronic thing.) However, I did not feel that Mariss Jansons really succeeding in welding the sections into a convincing whole, symphonic or otherwise. Rudolf Kempe, as so often, is a splendid model in that respect. There was little sense either of belief or of irony; one can opt for one or the other, perhaps even both, but I am not sure that ‘neither’ is a compelling option. There was, of course, much to enjoy, and I appreciated the subtlety of programming, the music for solo strings cleverly anticipating the second half’s Metamorphosen. Leader Vesko Eschkenazy’s rendition of the solo violin part was exemplary. And yet, as I tend to do in all but the best performances, I found that the work somewhat outstayed its welcome.
The problem, or rather reservation, I had with Metamorphosen, was rather different. Jansons opted not to conduct it at all. The Concertgebouw strings are wonderful musicians, of course, and do not need someone to beat time. It is, moreover, an interesting idea to assess this work in chamber music terms. There were certainly gains. No one could doubt that they were listening to each other; nor could anyone surely have missed the clarity with which Strauss’s counterpoint was projected. However, the performance ultimately fell between two stools. At times, it was directed from the first violin by Eschkenazy. The passages he directed tended, almost but not quite paradoxically, to sound more ‘conducted’, slightly squarer of rhythm, than if there had been an expert conductor on the podium. On the other hand, there were times when the chamber approach led rise to a slight interpretative anonymity, when I at least longed for more of an ‘idea’ to the performance. Perhaps the idea was to treat this as ‘absolute’ music, to steer clear of difficult wartime associations. I am sure it was not intentionally evasive, but by the same token, I am unsure that it is the best idea for a performance of Metamorphosen. It felt a little like a typical performance of the ‘Indian summer’ Duo concertante, which needs an inspired performance to avert suspicion of note-spinning. Anger and other passion were somewhat lacking, and the Eroica quotation went for surprisingly little. It was nevertheless a pity to have a respectable performance besmirched by some attention-seeking idiot shouting ‘Bravo’ as the final chord still resonated. (He had done the same at the end of Also sprach Zarathustra too, presumably desperate to have his voice heard before applause began.)
The Rosenkavalier suite is a dreadful thing, of course, whoever concocted it. (So, incidentally, is Strauss’s own Symphonic Fantasy on ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’; one desperately wants it to work, but it never does.) Still, I am sure if I were a conductor I should not be able to resist programming it, and as an audience member I certainly cannot bring myself to avoid listening to it. Here Jansons and the Concertgebouw truly struck gold, or perhaps better, silver. No one plays this music quite like the Viennese, but this was a perfectly valid different tone, cultivated, precise, and warm yet never indulgent. The woodwind section was utterly outstanding, its fluttering in the Overture perhaps the best I have ever heard, whether in terms of the suite or the opera. Alexei Ogrintchouk may have been first amongst equals when it came to his oboe solos, but first he certainly was. Jansons loved the music without smothering it, not only alert to its changing temperament but almost convincing in some of the (non-)transitions. Christian Thielemann doubtless seduces more in this music, but Jansons has its measure as well as anyone else. Even this curmudgeon came away from the Barbican joyfully singing to himself those gorgeous waltz tunes.
Showing posts with label Alexei Ogrintchouk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alexei Ogrintchouk. Show all posts
Saturday, 12 May 2012
Monday, 16 March 2009
Perahia/Concertgebouw/Haitink - Schumann and Bruckner, 15 March 2009
Barbican Hall
Schumann – Piano concerto in A minor, op.54
Bruckner – Symphony no.9 in D minor
Murray Perahia (piano)
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Bernard Haitink (conductor)
The first of the two Haitink/Concertgebouw concerts had been for the most part very fine. My sole disappointment, albeit a major one, concerned the final movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. I am happy to report that I entertained no reservations whatsoever concerning this Sunday afternoon concert.
It helps, of course, to have a soloist of the calibre of Murray Perahia. His exquisite touch is never merely pretty, though one suspects that he would be incapable of making an ugly sound at the piano if he tried – rather as one can tell the same of Liszt from his compositions. This would be of little import were it not for Perahia’s profound musical understanding, enhanced by his long-term study of Schenkerian analysis. There is more than one way to skin even a tonal cat, but Schenker clearly works for Perahia, as heard in his organicist projection of the work’s fundamental structure (Ursatz) and structural levels.
Perahia and Haitink seemed throughout to be of one interpretative mind, enabling a chamber-musical collaboration between soloist and orchestra, reserving Romantic confrontation for climactic moments, which therefore registered with all the greater musical power. Schumann’s supremely poetic rêveries were often as much orchestral as pianistic, and were sometimes heard at tempi, which, viewed ‘objectively,’ might appear too slow, but here seemed utterly natural. Flexibility was all, so much so that one barely noticed it. The Concertebouw’s woodwind principals sounded at least as fine as they had during the previous night’s La mer. Alexei Ogrintchouk, so fine a soloist at the Proms in 2007 and 2008, almost bade fair to steal the limelight from Perahia with his stunning solos at the openings to the first movement exposition and recapitulation. But then Perahia’s cadenza, building from Bachian polyphony to Brahmsian tumult reminded us who was a little more than first among equals.
The second movement was a true intermezzo, never heavy but likewise never trivial. Beautifully judged rubato from all concerned and exquisite orchestral balancing from Haitink and his players lent the movement the aura of a chamber Kinderszenen. The textural clarity that marked this performance throughout was, if anything, still more marked in the finale, especially in its contrapuntal passages. Perahia and Haitink again located Schumann rightly between Bach and Brahms. The movement was always clearly goal-oriented without falling into the trap of sounding unduly driven. Again, every tempo and every tempo variation sounded just ‘right’. This was a truly distinguished performance. There was even, towards the end, a very occasional wrong note, just to reassure us that Perahia was human after all.
Coming so soon after the Royal Festival Hall performance of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony from Zubin Mehta and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, comparisons would doubtless have been made by many in the audience. It is difficult to imagine that any comparative odium would have attached to Haitink and the Concertgebouw. Last month’s performance probably captured the palm in terms of ravishing orchestral beauty; Vienna has a tendency to do so. And that performance, as I made clear at the time, was a fine one indeed, never more so than in its final bars, ‘numinous to a degree’. Haitink’s account, however, was not only darker; it was truly devastating.
From the outset, this seemed on the cards, the opening as grimly ominous as any since Furtwängler. The darkness of the orchestral bass line was immediately apparent, contrasting starkly with the once again ravishing work of the orchestra’s woodwind soloists: Ogrintchouk again and the equally magnificient flautist, Kersten McCall. Haitink’s reading of the vast opening movement was impassioned yet never impetuous; it took as long as it needed but not a second longer. There was, as in all of the greatest interpretations, a supreme inevitability to the solemn onward tread: not antithetical to ‘foreground’ colour, but leaving one in no doubt that the latter arose from the former. The silences were as terrifying as the great orchestral unisons; likewise those strange periods of apparent stillness, in reality anything but, as Bruckner approaches the atonal threshold. Fine Mahlerian though he may be, I have often felt that Haitink’s sensibility is more closely attuned to Bruckner: elemental rather than neurotic. Yet I fancied that I heard a premonition of the march of souls on Judgement Day from the final movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony. Intentional or no, the resemblance was striking, albeit with one crucial distinction. Here, in Bruckner’s cosmic drama, the destination was far from clear; greater struggle would be required to attain anything akin to resolution or redemption, let alone resurrection. Approaching the ‘dear God’ to whom the symphony is dedicated seemed at this point almost as impossible as in Schoenberg’s likewise unfinished Moses und Aron. Baleful trombone quasi-equale prepared the way for a final statement of desolation, granite-like in its implacability.
At the opening of the scherzo – no jokes here... – I missed a little the sheer weight of sound from the previous month’s Viennese performance. Haitink’s tempo sounded faster too, arguably more scherzo-like. I was taken by the lumbering, almost outsize playfulness, if I may put it that way, of the trio’s opening: a strange mixture of the consoling and the unsettling. These, we were reminded, are tales of the gods – or of God: almost a Cosmic Pulses of the late nineteenth century. (Both Bruckner and Stockhausen were possessed of a truly mystical faith.) Haitink’s long-term strategy truly made itself felt in the return of the scherzo. Now it was weightier, far from a mere re-statement. As Heraclitus taught us, no man can step into the same river twice.
The conductor’s command of the score and its implications was equally apparent in his tonal-dramatic plan for the ‘final’ Adagio. In the opening phrase, we heard a Wagnerian attempt – Haitink is today second to none in Wagner too – to console, to resolve, to redeem, culminating in the Dresden Amen so familiar from Parsifal. It was less of a lament than one often hears, which intrigued me; all would be revealed, though not quite yet. There was no attempt to tone down the subsequent harmonies, poised once again so very close to the threshold of atonality, albeit always within a firmly established tonal context. When the opening material returned, it now had for more of the klagende Lied to it. Kundry might almost have been voicing it, as if to show that the premature attempt to resolve, like her attempt to convert Parsifal, had not worked, which of course it had not. The Concertgebouw’s Wagner tubas soon made their elegiac presence felt, as, harmonically, did a torment sublimated from Tristan und Isolde. Attempts properly to climax failed, as they were seemingly always fated to do, though we never gave up hope. Unlike Mehta’s ‘finished’ reading of this unfinished symphony, here we were left with the devastation of the unresolved. It was desperate but never Mahlerian, a true (non-)conclusion to a truly great performance. Haitink at eighty has never been greater.
Schumann – Piano concerto in A minor, op.54
Bruckner – Symphony no.9 in D minor
Murray Perahia (piano)
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Bernard Haitink (conductor)
The first of the two Haitink/Concertgebouw concerts had been for the most part very fine. My sole disappointment, albeit a major one, concerned the final movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. I am happy to report that I entertained no reservations whatsoever concerning this Sunday afternoon concert.
It helps, of course, to have a soloist of the calibre of Murray Perahia. His exquisite touch is never merely pretty, though one suspects that he would be incapable of making an ugly sound at the piano if he tried – rather as one can tell the same of Liszt from his compositions. This would be of little import were it not for Perahia’s profound musical understanding, enhanced by his long-term study of Schenkerian analysis. There is more than one way to skin even a tonal cat, but Schenker clearly works for Perahia, as heard in his organicist projection of the work’s fundamental structure (Ursatz) and structural levels.
Perahia and Haitink seemed throughout to be of one interpretative mind, enabling a chamber-musical collaboration between soloist and orchestra, reserving Romantic confrontation for climactic moments, which therefore registered with all the greater musical power. Schumann’s supremely poetic rêveries were often as much orchestral as pianistic, and were sometimes heard at tempi, which, viewed ‘objectively,’ might appear too slow, but here seemed utterly natural. Flexibility was all, so much so that one barely noticed it. The Concertebouw’s woodwind principals sounded at least as fine as they had during the previous night’s La mer. Alexei Ogrintchouk, so fine a soloist at the Proms in 2007 and 2008, almost bade fair to steal the limelight from Perahia with his stunning solos at the openings to the first movement exposition and recapitulation. But then Perahia’s cadenza, building from Bachian polyphony to Brahmsian tumult reminded us who was a little more than first among equals.
The second movement was a true intermezzo, never heavy but likewise never trivial. Beautifully judged rubato from all concerned and exquisite orchestral balancing from Haitink and his players lent the movement the aura of a chamber Kinderszenen. The textural clarity that marked this performance throughout was, if anything, still more marked in the finale, especially in its contrapuntal passages. Perahia and Haitink again located Schumann rightly between Bach and Brahms. The movement was always clearly goal-oriented without falling into the trap of sounding unduly driven. Again, every tempo and every tempo variation sounded just ‘right’. This was a truly distinguished performance. There was even, towards the end, a very occasional wrong note, just to reassure us that Perahia was human after all.
Coming so soon after the Royal Festival Hall performance of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony from Zubin Mehta and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, comparisons would doubtless have been made by many in the audience. It is difficult to imagine that any comparative odium would have attached to Haitink and the Concertgebouw. Last month’s performance probably captured the palm in terms of ravishing orchestral beauty; Vienna has a tendency to do so. And that performance, as I made clear at the time, was a fine one indeed, never more so than in its final bars, ‘numinous to a degree’. Haitink’s account, however, was not only darker; it was truly devastating.
From the outset, this seemed on the cards, the opening as grimly ominous as any since Furtwängler. The darkness of the orchestral bass line was immediately apparent, contrasting starkly with the once again ravishing work of the orchestra’s woodwind soloists: Ogrintchouk again and the equally magnificient flautist, Kersten McCall. Haitink’s reading of the vast opening movement was impassioned yet never impetuous; it took as long as it needed but not a second longer. There was, as in all of the greatest interpretations, a supreme inevitability to the solemn onward tread: not antithetical to ‘foreground’ colour, but leaving one in no doubt that the latter arose from the former. The silences were as terrifying as the great orchestral unisons; likewise those strange periods of apparent stillness, in reality anything but, as Bruckner approaches the atonal threshold. Fine Mahlerian though he may be, I have often felt that Haitink’s sensibility is more closely attuned to Bruckner: elemental rather than neurotic. Yet I fancied that I heard a premonition of the march of souls on Judgement Day from the final movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony. Intentional or no, the resemblance was striking, albeit with one crucial distinction. Here, in Bruckner’s cosmic drama, the destination was far from clear; greater struggle would be required to attain anything akin to resolution or redemption, let alone resurrection. Approaching the ‘dear God’ to whom the symphony is dedicated seemed at this point almost as impossible as in Schoenberg’s likewise unfinished Moses und Aron. Baleful trombone quasi-equale prepared the way for a final statement of desolation, granite-like in its implacability.
At the opening of the scherzo – no jokes here... – I missed a little the sheer weight of sound from the previous month’s Viennese performance. Haitink’s tempo sounded faster too, arguably more scherzo-like. I was taken by the lumbering, almost outsize playfulness, if I may put it that way, of the trio’s opening: a strange mixture of the consoling and the unsettling. These, we were reminded, are tales of the gods – or of God: almost a Cosmic Pulses of the late nineteenth century. (Both Bruckner and Stockhausen were possessed of a truly mystical faith.) Haitink’s long-term strategy truly made itself felt in the return of the scherzo. Now it was weightier, far from a mere re-statement. As Heraclitus taught us, no man can step into the same river twice.
The conductor’s command of the score and its implications was equally apparent in his tonal-dramatic plan for the ‘final’ Adagio. In the opening phrase, we heard a Wagnerian attempt – Haitink is today second to none in Wagner too – to console, to resolve, to redeem, culminating in the Dresden Amen so familiar from Parsifal. It was less of a lament than one often hears, which intrigued me; all would be revealed, though not quite yet. There was no attempt to tone down the subsequent harmonies, poised once again so very close to the threshold of atonality, albeit always within a firmly established tonal context. When the opening material returned, it now had for more of the klagende Lied to it. Kundry might almost have been voicing it, as if to show that the premature attempt to resolve, like her attempt to convert Parsifal, had not worked, which of course it had not. The Concertgebouw’s Wagner tubas soon made their elegiac presence felt, as, harmonically, did a torment sublimated from Tristan und Isolde. Attempts properly to climax failed, as they were seemingly always fated to do, though we never gave up hope. Unlike Mehta’s ‘finished’ reading of this unfinished symphony, here we were left with the devastation of the unresolved. It was desperate but never Mahlerian, a true (non-)conclusion to a truly great performance. Haitink at eighty has never been greater.
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
Prom 45: BBC SSO/Volkov, et al., 19 August 2008
Royal Albert Hall
Harvey – Tombeau de Messiaen
Messiaen – Concert à quatre
Harvey – Mortuos plango, vivos voco
Harvey (with Gilbert Nouno and Arshia Cont: IRCAM computer music designers) – Soundings (world premiere)
Varèse – Poème électronique
Varèse – Déserts
Cédric Tiberghien (piano)
Emily Beynon (flute)
Alexei Ogrintchouk (oboe)
Danjulo Ishizaka (’cello)
Jonathan Harvey (sound projection: Harvey)
Jerémie Henrot and Clément Marie (IRCAM sound projection: Soundings)
Ben Bayliss and Chris Beddall (sound projection: Varèse)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov (conductor)
Interesting and intelligent programming may prove to be a hallmark of Roger Wright’s tenure at the Proms. One can only hope so following the previous dispensation, much of which has remained in evidence during this ‘changeover’ season. At the heart of the programme lay the music of Jonathan Harvey, a fine composer, far too often overlooked in his own country. It would seem that his marriage of modernism, not least a keen interest in French spectralism and electronics, and a deep, syncretic spirituality – yes, I too generally run a mile upon hearing that word; but this is the real thing, not the easy-access, synthetic bells and smells of the ‘holy minimalists’ – has not always appealed to the English empirical temperament. All the more reason then to grant him such a splendid opportunity as this. Harvey studied with Messiaen and the two composers’ concerns in various ways overlap. An ongoing association with IRCAM – brain-child of Boulez, another Messiaen pupil – brought us the classic electronic work, Mortuos plango, vivos voco, and a new work, Soundings, co-commissioned by the BBC, IRCAM, and Radio France, as the third and final part of a trilogy ‘referring to the Buddhist purification of body, mind, and speech’. Soundings was composed by Harvey as Composer-in-Association to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, who premiered it this evening. And then, for the third part of the concert, we turned to the still-bracing dawn of electronic music, to the work of Varèse. Having questioned the suitability of the Royal Albert Hall for various more ‘conventional’ works, I am happy to report that, on this occasion, the space worked very well. This may partly have been owed to the vagaries of seating – even sitting a few seats away appears to make quite a difference here – yet the space itself added something important, visually and acoustically, to the electronic works.
Harvey’s Tombeau de Messiaen, for piano and digital tape, opened the programme. In a brief programme note, Harvey cited Messiaen as a ‘protospectralist ... fascinated by the colours of the harmonic series and its distortions, ... [who] found therein a prismatic play of light’. And so, the tape part of this 1994 tribute is made of twelve piano sounds tuned to the harmonic series, one for each pitch class. The piano part, in equal temperament of course, then plays with these series, both combining with and distorting them: ‘never entirely belonging, never entirely separate’. This interplay was dazzlingly captured by Cédric Tiberghien, as were the bell-like echoes – a slightly nauseous yet colourful pealing – not only of Messiaen but also, I fancied, of the Debussy of La cathédrale engloutie. ‘Echoes’ was also the operative word for the crucial role of the hall. Harvey and Tiberghien exploited the full extremities of the keyboard, before moving to a piercing climax of an almost Messiaenesque ecstasy.
Concert à quatre (1990-92) is Messiaen’s final work, completed by Yvonne Loriod, in consultation with Heinz Holliger and George Benjamin. From the very first notes, it is instantly recognisable as Messiaen, indeed as the work of the same composer who, compositional developments notwithstanding, had written L’Ascension sixty years earlier. Emily Beynon and Alexei Ogrintchouk are both principals with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, whose long experience with French music was surely valuable here, but the BBC SSO too managed to sound convincingly ‘modern French’ (think of the Orchestre de Paris or the Orchestre National de France). In the first movement, the Entrée, it was once again Tiberghien’s opportunity to shine, the piano being treated as a solo instrument apart from the rest of the concertante group. Needless to say, he grasped this opportunity, exhibiting glistening tone and dazzling rhythmical precision. The orchestra’s ten (!) percussionists, including wind-machine, certainly made their presence felt too, though never unduly. For the second movement Vocalise, Messiaen transcribed with ornamentation a piece he had written in 1935 for a series of vocal studies. It is tribute to the constancy of his style and voice, that this in no sense sounded out of place. The beautiful A major melody, ‘warmed’, in Paul Griffiths’s excellent choice of verb, by the composer’s third mode of limited transposition, was passed between each of the soloists in turn, the orchestra here being of secondary importance, timbral ‘warming’ furnished by a limited number of strings. Beynon presented a ravishingly lyrical opening, followed by an equally heart-stopping duet between oboe and piano, Ogrintchouk being possessed, it would seem, of unlimited and luxurious reserves of line and breath. The unapologetically Romantic ’cello entry was meltingly taken by BBC New Generation Artist, Danjulo Ishizaka, who also shone in the ensuing Cadenza. So too did the combined forces of the xylophone, xylorimba, and marimba. For the final Rondeau, Ilan Volkov clearly delineated its verse-refrain form. He and his players also imparted a welcome sense of the apocalyptic. The dialogue between piano and bells took on an aptly ecclesiastical tinge as versicle and response. This movement teemed, quite properly, with life and joy.
Mortuos plango, vivos voco, for eight-channel tape (1980), was inspired by the sounds of bells and choristers at Winchester Cathedral, where Harvey’s son had sung. The largest bell has inscribed upon it the text: HORAS AVOLANTES NUMERO, MORTUOS PLANGO, VIVOS AD PRECES VOCO (‘I count the fleeing hours, I lament the dead, I call the living to prayer’). Harvey cleverly – and movingly – conveys this through the ‘dead’, however rich, sound of the bell and the ‘live’ sound of the boy, the audience inside the surrounding sound of the former, whilst the latter ‘flies freely around’. I was reminded not only of the English cathedral tradition– and of English cathedrals themselves –but also of the strange, threatening, yet ineffably beautiful Venice of Nono. It was interesting to note how very much more human, less alien, this work sounded than Stockhausen’s COSMIC PULSES had a couple of weeks before. This is new music concerned with utterly ‘traditional’ Christian concerns of life and death, nowhere more so than in the dying away al niente of the bell sounds. The hall itself took on an aptly Gothic splendour as the frame for the music.
In Soundings, Harvey explains, he ‘wanted to bring together orchestral music and human speech. It is as if the orchestra is learning to speak, like a baby with its mother, or like first man, or like listening to a highly expressive language we don’t understand. The rhythms and emotional tones of speech are formed by semantics, but even more they are formed by feelings – in that respect they approach song.’ Quite apart from the eloquence with which the composer elucidated the imperative behind his work, this is very much what we heard, for which tribute should also be paid to Volkov and his excellent orchestra. (How very different from the dispiriting Mahler and Damnation of Faust I heard them give at the Proms a few years ago.) The Ur-quality of the opening inevitably brought to mind earlier ‘creations’ of music out of the void: The Creation, Das Rheingold, Berg’s Op.6 Orchestral Pieces. This sounded very much as Harvey described it: ‘like an incarnation, the descent into human life.’ Leader Elizabeth Layton did sterling work with several taxing solos, although she was far from alone in this respect. Swarming strings and Messiaenesque chattering woodwind were keen contributors. The second of the three movements – continuous, yet distinct – is an expansion of the work Sprechgesang (for English horn and chamber ensemble). For Harvey, it is ‘concerned with the frenetic chatter of human life in all its expressions of domination, assertion, fear, love, etc.’, which ‘finally moves, exhausted, to mantra and a celebration of ritual language. The mantra is orchestrated and treated by shape vocoding.’ The voices actually put me in mind of an electronic version of Berio’s Sinfonia, which of course has its fair share of ‘frenetic chatter’. Passages of joy were reminiscent once again of Messiaen, who would surely have understood and shared Harvey’s concerns. There were even Romantic ghosts in the machine in the guise of virtuoso piano (splendidly performed by Lynda Cochrane) and languorous woodwind phrases. For the third movement ‘speech has a calmer purpose; it is married to a music of unity, a hymn which is close to Gregorian chant.’ This was certainly apparent, not least in the ominous monodic passages for brass and electronics. The movement built towards a shattering, almost Brucknerian climax, before reverting to some earlier material, taken in different directions, with some further Messiaenesque activity. Divisions between work, performance and audience broke down as the sound enveloped us and took us somewhere beyond, to the transcendent. ‘The paradise of the sounding temple is imagined.’
Varèse’s Poème électronique, for pre-recorded magnetic tape, was composed for Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. (Those were the days!) It was the architect’s insistence, against considerable scepticism from Philips, which ensured that Varèse would be the composer of precisely 480 seconds of music, created second by second from both ‘real’ and purely electronic sounds. (Interestingly, much of the technical design for the pavilion was delegated to Le Corbusier’s assistant, none other than the young Xenakis.) Although the pavilion was demolished, Varèse’s music was preserved and subsequently transferred to computer. The opening bell sounds provided a link with Harvey, but soon we hurtled into an extraordinary futuristic world with a multiplicity of sounds, from organ to heavy industry. At this distance – we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary –there was occasionally something of the Heath Robinson to some of this, but every work, even that of Varèse, must eventually be classicised and take upon itself something of its own time as well as ours. The closing storm-winds set the scene for the déserts of the following, final work.
Here, in Déserts, for fifteen wind instruments, percussion (all ten players once again, including piano), and magnetic tape (1950-54), we were once again awakened by the chiming of bells. An overriding impression from both work and performance would be summed up by the word Boulez had not so long previously used at the head of the seventh of his piano Notations, as yet unpublished: Hiératique. The ghost of Varèse’s own Ionisation was far from lain. Volkov and his instrumentalists were impressively insistent, accomplishing the paradoxical feat of sounding both variegated and monolithic – in fact, rather like the three interpolated passages of ‘organised sound’. All the necessary precision and timbral starkness were there. The electronic sounds are again utterly of the twentieth century – unlike much tamer twentieth-century music – in their evocation of an age of warfare and ‘technological progress’, of deserts both natural and urban, and of what Varèse called ‘this distant inner space where no telescope can reach, where man is alone in a world of mystery and essential solitude’. Gleaming brass was uncompromisingly Corbusier-like, as opposed to the Bauhaus constructivism of some at least of twelve-note Schoenberg; it is interesting, how often one reaches for architectural simile when thinking of Varèse, more often indeed than one does with Xenakis, of whom one might have expected it. This performance marked a fine end to an outstanding concert.
Harvey – Tombeau de Messiaen
Messiaen – Concert à quatre
Harvey – Mortuos plango, vivos voco
Harvey (with Gilbert Nouno and Arshia Cont: IRCAM computer music designers) – Soundings (world premiere)
Varèse – Poème électronique
Varèse – Déserts
Cédric Tiberghien (piano)
Emily Beynon (flute)
Alexei Ogrintchouk (oboe)
Danjulo Ishizaka (’cello)
Jonathan Harvey (sound projection: Harvey)
Jerémie Henrot and Clément Marie (IRCAM sound projection: Soundings)
Ben Bayliss and Chris Beddall (sound projection: Varèse)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov (conductor)
Interesting and intelligent programming may prove to be a hallmark of Roger Wright’s tenure at the Proms. One can only hope so following the previous dispensation, much of which has remained in evidence during this ‘changeover’ season. At the heart of the programme lay the music of Jonathan Harvey, a fine composer, far too often overlooked in his own country. It would seem that his marriage of modernism, not least a keen interest in French spectralism and electronics, and a deep, syncretic spirituality – yes, I too generally run a mile upon hearing that word; but this is the real thing, not the easy-access, synthetic bells and smells of the ‘holy minimalists’ – has not always appealed to the English empirical temperament. All the more reason then to grant him such a splendid opportunity as this. Harvey studied with Messiaen and the two composers’ concerns in various ways overlap. An ongoing association with IRCAM – brain-child of Boulez, another Messiaen pupil – brought us the classic electronic work, Mortuos plango, vivos voco, and a new work, Soundings, co-commissioned by the BBC, IRCAM, and Radio France, as the third and final part of a trilogy ‘referring to the Buddhist purification of body, mind, and speech’. Soundings was composed by Harvey as Composer-in-Association to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, who premiered it this evening. And then, for the third part of the concert, we turned to the still-bracing dawn of electronic music, to the work of Varèse. Having questioned the suitability of the Royal Albert Hall for various more ‘conventional’ works, I am happy to report that, on this occasion, the space worked very well. This may partly have been owed to the vagaries of seating – even sitting a few seats away appears to make quite a difference here – yet the space itself added something important, visually and acoustically, to the electronic works.
Harvey’s Tombeau de Messiaen, for piano and digital tape, opened the programme. In a brief programme note, Harvey cited Messiaen as a ‘protospectralist ... fascinated by the colours of the harmonic series and its distortions, ... [who] found therein a prismatic play of light’. And so, the tape part of this 1994 tribute is made of twelve piano sounds tuned to the harmonic series, one for each pitch class. The piano part, in equal temperament of course, then plays with these series, both combining with and distorting them: ‘never entirely belonging, never entirely separate’. This interplay was dazzlingly captured by Cédric Tiberghien, as were the bell-like echoes – a slightly nauseous yet colourful pealing – not only of Messiaen but also, I fancied, of the Debussy of La cathédrale engloutie. ‘Echoes’ was also the operative word for the crucial role of the hall. Harvey and Tiberghien exploited the full extremities of the keyboard, before moving to a piercing climax of an almost Messiaenesque ecstasy.
Concert à quatre (1990-92) is Messiaen’s final work, completed by Yvonne Loriod, in consultation with Heinz Holliger and George Benjamin. From the very first notes, it is instantly recognisable as Messiaen, indeed as the work of the same composer who, compositional developments notwithstanding, had written L’Ascension sixty years earlier. Emily Beynon and Alexei Ogrintchouk are both principals with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, whose long experience with French music was surely valuable here, but the BBC SSO too managed to sound convincingly ‘modern French’ (think of the Orchestre de Paris or the Orchestre National de France). In the first movement, the Entrée, it was once again Tiberghien’s opportunity to shine, the piano being treated as a solo instrument apart from the rest of the concertante group. Needless to say, he grasped this opportunity, exhibiting glistening tone and dazzling rhythmical precision. The orchestra’s ten (!) percussionists, including wind-machine, certainly made their presence felt too, though never unduly. For the second movement Vocalise, Messiaen transcribed with ornamentation a piece he had written in 1935 for a series of vocal studies. It is tribute to the constancy of his style and voice, that this in no sense sounded out of place. The beautiful A major melody, ‘warmed’, in Paul Griffiths’s excellent choice of verb, by the composer’s third mode of limited transposition, was passed between each of the soloists in turn, the orchestra here being of secondary importance, timbral ‘warming’ furnished by a limited number of strings. Beynon presented a ravishingly lyrical opening, followed by an equally heart-stopping duet between oboe and piano, Ogrintchouk being possessed, it would seem, of unlimited and luxurious reserves of line and breath. The unapologetically Romantic ’cello entry was meltingly taken by BBC New Generation Artist, Danjulo Ishizaka, who also shone in the ensuing Cadenza. So too did the combined forces of the xylophone, xylorimba, and marimba. For the final Rondeau, Ilan Volkov clearly delineated its verse-refrain form. He and his players also imparted a welcome sense of the apocalyptic. The dialogue between piano and bells took on an aptly ecclesiastical tinge as versicle and response. This movement teemed, quite properly, with life and joy.
Mortuos plango, vivos voco, for eight-channel tape (1980), was inspired by the sounds of bells and choristers at Winchester Cathedral, where Harvey’s son had sung. The largest bell has inscribed upon it the text: HORAS AVOLANTES NUMERO, MORTUOS PLANGO, VIVOS AD PRECES VOCO (‘I count the fleeing hours, I lament the dead, I call the living to prayer’). Harvey cleverly – and movingly – conveys this through the ‘dead’, however rich, sound of the bell and the ‘live’ sound of the boy, the audience inside the surrounding sound of the former, whilst the latter ‘flies freely around’. I was reminded not only of the English cathedral tradition– and of English cathedrals themselves –but also of the strange, threatening, yet ineffably beautiful Venice of Nono. It was interesting to note how very much more human, less alien, this work sounded than Stockhausen’s COSMIC PULSES had a couple of weeks before. This is new music concerned with utterly ‘traditional’ Christian concerns of life and death, nowhere more so than in the dying away al niente of the bell sounds. The hall itself took on an aptly Gothic splendour as the frame for the music.
In Soundings, Harvey explains, he ‘wanted to bring together orchestral music and human speech. It is as if the orchestra is learning to speak, like a baby with its mother, or like first man, or like listening to a highly expressive language we don’t understand. The rhythms and emotional tones of speech are formed by semantics, but even more they are formed by feelings – in that respect they approach song.’ Quite apart from the eloquence with which the composer elucidated the imperative behind his work, this is very much what we heard, for which tribute should also be paid to Volkov and his excellent orchestra. (How very different from the dispiriting Mahler and Damnation of Faust I heard them give at the Proms a few years ago.) The Ur-quality of the opening inevitably brought to mind earlier ‘creations’ of music out of the void: The Creation, Das Rheingold, Berg’s Op.6 Orchestral Pieces. This sounded very much as Harvey described it: ‘like an incarnation, the descent into human life.’ Leader Elizabeth Layton did sterling work with several taxing solos, although she was far from alone in this respect. Swarming strings and Messiaenesque chattering woodwind were keen contributors. The second of the three movements – continuous, yet distinct – is an expansion of the work Sprechgesang (for English horn and chamber ensemble). For Harvey, it is ‘concerned with the frenetic chatter of human life in all its expressions of domination, assertion, fear, love, etc.’, which ‘finally moves, exhausted, to mantra and a celebration of ritual language. The mantra is orchestrated and treated by shape vocoding.’ The voices actually put me in mind of an electronic version of Berio’s Sinfonia, which of course has its fair share of ‘frenetic chatter’. Passages of joy were reminiscent once again of Messiaen, who would surely have understood and shared Harvey’s concerns. There were even Romantic ghosts in the machine in the guise of virtuoso piano (splendidly performed by Lynda Cochrane) and languorous woodwind phrases. For the third movement ‘speech has a calmer purpose; it is married to a music of unity, a hymn which is close to Gregorian chant.’ This was certainly apparent, not least in the ominous monodic passages for brass and electronics. The movement built towards a shattering, almost Brucknerian climax, before reverting to some earlier material, taken in different directions, with some further Messiaenesque activity. Divisions between work, performance and audience broke down as the sound enveloped us and took us somewhere beyond, to the transcendent. ‘The paradise of the sounding temple is imagined.’
Varèse’s Poème électronique, for pre-recorded magnetic tape, was composed for Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. (Those were the days!) It was the architect’s insistence, against considerable scepticism from Philips, which ensured that Varèse would be the composer of precisely 480 seconds of music, created second by second from both ‘real’ and purely electronic sounds. (Interestingly, much of the technical design for the pavilion was delegated to Le Corbusier’s assistant, none other than the young Xenakis.) Although the pavilion was demolished, Varèse’s music was preserved and subsequently transferred to computer. The opening bell sounds provided a link with Harvey, but soon we hurtled into an extraordinary futuristic world with a multiplicity of sounds, from organ to heavy industry. At this distance – we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary –there was occasionally something of the Heath Robinson to some of this, but every work, even that of Varèse, must eventually be classicised and take upon itself something of its own time as well as ours. The closing storm-winds set the scene for the déserts of the following, final work.
Here, in Déserts, for fifteen wind instruments, percussion (all ten players once again, including piano), and magnetic tape (1950-54), we were once again awakened by the chiming of bells. An overriding impression from both work and performance would be summed up by the word Boulez had not so long previously used at the head of the seventh of his piano Notations, as yet unpublished: Hiératique. The ghost of Varèse’s own Ionisation was far from lain. Volkov and his instrumentalists were impressively insistent, accomplishing the paradoxical feat of sounding both variegated and monolithic – in fact, rather like the three interpolated passages of ‘organised sound’. All the necessary precision and timbral starkness were there. The electronic sounds are again utterly of the twentieth century – unlike much tamer twentieth-century music – in their evocation of an age of warfare and ‘technological progress’, of deserts both natural and urban, and of what Varèse called ‘this distant inner space where no telescope can reach, where man is alone in a world of mystery and essential solitude’. Gleaming brass was uncompromisingly Corbusier-like, as opposed to the Bauhaus constructivism of some at least of twelve-note Schoenberg; it is interesting, how often one reaches for architectural simile when thinking of Varèse, more often indeed than one does with Xenakis, of whom one might have expected it. This performance marked a fine end to an outstanding concert.
Monday, 6 August 2007
Prom 31: Brahms, Elgar, Strauss
5 August 2007
Brahms: Variations on a theme by Haydn, Op.56a
Elgar: Variations on an original theme ('Enigma')
Strauss: Oboe Concerto in D major
Strauss: Suite from Der Rosenkavalier
Alexei Ogrintchouk (oboe)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (conductor)
This concert should have been conducted by Daniele Gatti, but illness had caused him to withdraw, leaving Gennadi Rozhdestvensky to deputise. I could not help thinking that it might have been a different occasion without this intervention from Fate; nor could I help thinking that Rozhdestvensky would have been happier conducting Prokofiev, or some other music with which he was more closely associated. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is not London's finest, but I have heard it perform more than creditably under Gatti, in Mahler and Berg. Here, for much of the time, it did not.
The concert opened with a weak performance of the Brahms Variations on a theme by Haydn. (Brahms used this title, so I do not think we need modishly change it, now that we believe that Haydn composed neither the theme, nor the divertimento in which Brahms discovered it.) It was not perverse, as was the performance Sir Simon Rattle gave with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra at the Proms a few years ago, when far too much was fussily underlined, or italicised, or both. However, the orchestra sounded lacklustre, and whilst certain variations received a degree of characterisation, others went for little, and there was almost no sense of forming part of a greater whole. It is not an easy thing to characterise and yet to integrate into a great symphonic sweep, yet the piece demands it. Furtwängler was able to do this, as have quite a few subsequent conductors, but it was not to be. Throughout, the strings, although hardly few in number, sounded faint and watery; that echt-Brahmsian dark-mahogany richness of tone was never to be heard. The final peroration sounded brighter, but when the most impressive things were a suitably rustic contrabasson and the sonorous ringing of the triangle, more than a little was amiss. Here, as elsewhere throughout the evening, members of the orchestra were sometimes alarmingly out of kilter with their colleagues.
The Enigma Variations were less lacklustre, though hardly memorable. This was not a typically 'English' reading. There is nothing wrong with that, for different perspectives can shed interesting light on well-known works, but it did not seem a fully considered alternative. Flashes of orchestral colour, often surprisingly brash, alternated with a great deal of run-of-the-mill playing. 'Nimrod' was deeply felt, an almost Beethovenian oasis of noble calm, but little of the rest lived up to its promise. The brass section acquitted itself very well, as it would whenever called upon throughout the night. Unfortunately, this served above all to highlight the shortcomings of the wishy-washy strings.
The second half was better. Perhaps Strauss was more Rozhdestvensky's thing, or perhaps he simply knew the pieces better. I am not quite sure that the latter was true, at least in the case of the Oboe Concerto. For whilst the ensemble was much improved, he seemed content to adopt an 'accompanying' role that seasoned Straussians such as Kempe or Karajan would never have considered. The orchestral woodwind provided its own piquant detail from time to time, but this was really the soloist's show. Suffice it to say that Alexei Ogrintchouk proved a very fine oboist - and a very fine musician. Ever attentive to the twists and turns of Strauss's often treacherously lengthy lines, his varied singing tone, aided by crafty yet concealed tonguing, lifted the evening's music-making to another level. This neo-Mozartian product of Strauss's fabled 'Indian summer' sounded like the lyrical successor to Daphne that it is, rather than a soloist's showcase. A pupil of Maurice Bourgue and already Principal Oboist of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Ogrintchouk deserves to go far indeed.
A suite from Der Rosenkavalier ended the concert. Here, at last, the whole orchestra sounded more committed. If the strings hardly compared to those of Vienna, at least they sounded less grey. The leader, Clio Gould's solo was quite delectable; she had been poorly served by her colleagues for most of the concert. The brass once again and the percussion shone. The horns' coital whooping during the Overture truly sounded like the 'real thing'. Yet the selection was strangely made, and did not tally with the 1945 Suite Michael Kennedy delineated in the programme. It may have been that selection (possibly by Artur Rodzinski) minus the Presentation of the Rose and the excerpt from the Trio; at any rate, those moments of sweet repose were absent, lending the rather arbitrary progression of what remained an undue brashness. All in all, this was not an evening of triumph, save for that undoubtedly pertaining to Ogrintchouk.
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