St Mary Abchurch
Chopin – Prelude in C-sharp minor, op.45
Chopin – Mazurkas, op.59
Debussy – Préludes, Book I (selection)
Schumann – Kreisleriana, op.16
An especially welcome feature of this year’s City of London Festival is a series of early evening concerts (6 p.m.) featuring BBC New Generation Artists, all of which will subsequently be broadcast on Radio 3. This piano recital was given by the young Swiss pianist, Francesco Piemontesi, about whom I had heard a number of good reports. On the basis of the present performance, I hope and expect that we shall hear much more from him.
The opening Chopin C-sharp minor Prelude took its time, which is not to say that it was sluggish; far from it, for Piemontesi seemed to be framing it as a prelude to the programme as a whole, communicating joy and wonder in its harmonic revelations, closer to the C major Prelude from Book One of the Forty-Eight than I can recall hearing before. Yet it was not all harmony: Piemontesi demonstrated beyond doubt that he knew how to deliver a melting Chopin melodic line. The blurring acoustic of St Mary Abchurch did the two op.59 Mazurkas no favours. Though lovingly explored, there were occasions, especially during the first of the pair, when the rhythm – this is partly a matter of accent too – sounded closer to a relatively slow waltz than to a mazurka. A touch more rubato would not have gone amiss either.
Danseuses de Delphes received an impressive performance indeed, its cumulative power undeniable yet never exaggerated, founded upon a marriage of secure harmonic understanding, underpinned by accomplished Debussy pedalling, and finely spun legato, negating the piano’s irksome – in this context – hammers. Piemontesi seemed to highlight the post-Wagnerian qualities of Debussy’s harmonic writing, the legacy of Parsifal in particular. Voiles and Minstrels proceeded in not entirely dissimilar vein. The pianist’s emphasis upon harmonic revelation in time, connecting back to the opening Chopin Prelude, was welcome indeed, and never less than thought-provoking, but lightness of touch, which need not entail skating over those progressions, might sometimes have been more to the fore. Maurizio Pollini’s recent account of Voiles managed more fully both to provoke and to satisfy, to scintillate too, but it is surely evidence of Piemontesi’s artistry that one might even consider such a comparison.
The opening two movements of Kreisleriana impressively portrayed Schumann’s dialectic between Florestan and Eusebius, Piemontesi’s sure command of rhythm enabling him to unleash and to underpin both fire and fantasy. The second, ‘Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch,’ acquired an almost hypnotic quality, yet equally important, almost a counterbalance, was the palpable sincerity of the composer’s voice as sounded by Piemontesi. Later on, the acoustic – and, one sensed, perhaps the pianist’s inclination – tended to favour poetic introspection over passionate volubility. Faster passages when louder could sometimes become mere washes of sound, though the impishness of passages in the fifth and final movements came across very well, the darkness of the latter too. The magic, however, of Piemontesi’s Schumann as dreamer cast quite a spell, revived in an utterly rapt encore account of Der Dichter spricht, whose questing harmonic exploration, simpler perhaps but equally powerful, returned us anew to the virtues of that opening Chopin Prelude.
The recital will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Friday 22 July at 1 p.m. I hope that the increasingly raucous sounds from outside the church – could the adjacent wine bar not have requested that its well-heeled City patrons remain indoors for but an hour? – will intrude less than they did on the evening itself.
Showing posts with label City of London Festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label City of London Festival. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 July 2011
Friday, 11 July 2008
LSO/Gergiev: Mahler, 10 July 2008
St Paul's Cathedral
Mahler - Symphony no.8 in E-flat major
Victoria Yastrebova (soprano)
Ailish Tynan (soprano)
Liudmilla Dudinova (soprano)
Lili Paasikivi (mezzo-soprano)
Zlata Bulycheva (mezzo-soprano)
Sergey Semishkur (tenor)
Alexey Markov (baritone)
Evgeny Nitikin (bass)
The Choir of Eltham College
London Symphony Chorus
The Choral Arts Society of Washington
London Symphony Orchestra
Valery Gergiev (conductor)
This was the culmination of 'Gergiev's Mahler' and also part of the City of London Festival. I attended two previous performances in the cycle: an intermittently impressive Seventh, and a catastrophic Ninth (plus the Adagio from the Tenth). I had little idea, then, what to expect, although I did not really expect this. Put simply, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to reach any kind of judgement or even to gain any real impression concerning this performance, on account of the acoustic. St Paul's Cathedral is always likely to be a problematic venue for musical performances, although a performance I heard two or three years ago of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony (Hallé/Mark Elder) fared much better, not least since Elder appeared willing to use the acoustic to transform what would usually be silences into heavenly echoes. I am not sure that Valery Gergiev could have done much with Mahler's Eighth however: the problems appeared insuperable. Gergiev was never likely to have turned in a performance of the almost incredible marriage of tonal warmth and analytical clarity of Pierre Boulez last year, not to mention Boulez's awe-inspiring symphonic coherence. Yet Boulez had the Berlin Philharmonie; Gergiev had St Paul's. Most of the sound was swallowed up under the great dome; that which remained was mostly turned into a homogeneous mush. Sounds drifted into or - more often - out of focus. Everything sounded extremely distant. Oddly, the few sounds that fared well were those one might have expected to vanish from one's perceptions altogether: the violin solo, the outstanding boys' voices of the Choir of St Eltham's College, and even - just once - the mandolin.
My impression - and it can really be nothing more than this - was that otherwise, much of this most kaleidoscopic of works sounded laboured. Even though it was not an exceptionally slow reading by the clock (just about eighty minutes, I think), it sounded like it. Gergiev's tempo changes did not make much sense, sounding merely arbitrary. And the solo vocal contributions from an almost entirely Russian set of singers (perhaps a repeat from Gergiev's performance in St Petersburg?) sounded almost uniformly 'operatic' in nature, missing much of the point of Mahler's very singular approach in this symphony. Their vocalising sounded more akin to Verdi and Puccini than to Schubert or Wagner, let alone to Mahler himself. Perhaps they were just straining to be heard; after all, I heard Evgeni Nikitin give an excellent performance in Dallapiccola's Il prigioniero earlier this year. Lest one suspect that this shortcoming were a product of nationality, it was just as much the case with Ailish Tynan, with the exception that she added an absence - if one can add an absence - of vocal weight to the handicap of inappropriate style. As for Liudmilla Dudinova's hopelessly out-of-sync and out-of-tune Una Poenitentum, which reached us - eventually - from somewhere above, it was nothing short of a catastrophe. The choral contributions often sounded muted, although there was an impressive rise in temperature for the final peroration, Mahler's setting of some of the most celebrated words in the German language. Gergiev seemingly rose to the occasion here too, with the orchestral contribution for the last five minutes or so impressively stentorian and resolutely un-sentimental. This must all remain, however, hesitant and provisional. I can appreciate that the Barbican might not have been appropriate for this work, but it would have been better off performed in the Royal Albert Hall, or indeed in several other venues. Perhaps financial pressures played their part; perhaps some City subsidy was received. Whatever the story, the decision to perform this symphony at St Paul's proved disastrous.
Mahler - Symphony no.8 in E-flat major
Victoria Yastrebova (soprano)
Ailish Tynan (soprano)
Liudmilla Dudinova (soprano)
Lili Paasikivi (mezzo-soprano)
Zlata Bulycheva (mezzo-soprano)
Sergey Semishkur (tenor)
Alexey Markov (baritone)
Evgeny Nitikin (bass)
The Choir of Eltham College
London Symphony Chorus
The Choral Arts Society of Washington
London Symphony Orchestra
Valery Gergiev (conductor)
This was the culmination of 'Gergiev's Mahler' and also part of the City of London Festival. I attended two previous performances in the cycle: an intermittently impressive Seventh, and a catastrophic Ninth (plus the Adagio from the Tenth). I had little idea, then, what to expect, although I did not really expect this. Put simply, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to reach any kind of judgement or even to gain any real impression concerning this performance, on account of the acoustic. St Paul's Cathedral is always likely to be a problematic venue for musical performances, although a performance I heard two or three years ago of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony (Hallé/Mark Elder) fared much better, not least since Elder appeared willing to use the acoustic to transform what would usually be silences into heavenly echoes. I am not sure that Valery Gergiev could have done much with Mahler's Eighth however: the problems appeared insuperable. Gergiev was never likely to have turned in a performance of the almost incredible marriage of tonal warmth and analytical clarity of Pierre Boulez last year, not to mention Boulez's awe-inspiring symphonic coherence. Yet Boulez had the Berlin Philharmonie; Gergiev had St Paul's. Most of the sound was swallowed up under the great dome; that which remained was mostly turned into a homogeneous mush. Sounds drifted into or - more often - out of focus. Everything sounded extremely distant. Oddly, the few sounds that fared well were those one might have expected to vanish from one's perceptions altogether: the violin solo, the outstanding boys' voices of the Choir of St Eltham's College, and even - just once - the mandolin.
My impression - and it can really be nothing more than this - was that otherwise, much of this most kaleidoscopic of works sounded laboured. Even though it was not an exceptionally slow reading by the clock (just about eighty minutes, I think), it sounded like it. Gergiev's tempo changes did not make much sense, sounding merely arbitrary. And the solo vocal contributions from an almost entirely Russian set of singers (perhaps a repeat from Gergiev's performance in St Petersburg?) sounded almost uniformly 'operatic' in nature, missing much of the point of Mahler's very singular approach in this symphony. Their vocalising sounded more akin to Verdi and Puccini than to Schubert or Wagner, let alone to Mahler himself. Perhaps they were just straining to be heard; after all, I heard Evgeni Nikitin give an excellent performance in Dallapiccola's Il prigioniero earlier this year. Lest one suspect that this shortcoming were a product of nationality, it was just as much the case with Ailish Tynan, with the exception that she added an absence - if one can add an absence - of vocal weight to the handicap of inappropriate style. As for Liudmilla Dudinova's hopelessly out-of-sync and out-of-tune Una Poenitentum, which reached us - eventually - from somewhere above, it was nothing short of a catastrophe. The choral contributions often sounded muted, although there was an impressive rise in temperature for the final peroration, Mahler's setting of some of the most celebrated words in the German language. Gergiev seemingly rose to the occasion here too, with the orchestral contribution for the last five minutes or so impressively stentorian and resolutely un-sentimental. This must all remain, however, hesitant and provisional. I can appreciate that the Barbican might not have been appropriate for this work, but it would have been better off performed in the Royal Albert Hall, or indeed in several other venues. Perhaps financial pressures played their part; perhaps some City subsidy was received. Whatever the story, the decision to perform this symphony at St Paul's proved disastrous.
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