Kopatchinskaja/BFO/Fischer - Stravinsky, 17 February 2022

Royal Festival Hall

Jeu de cartes
Violin Concerto
Petrushka (1947 version)

Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)

Budapest Festival Orchestra

Iván Fischer (conductor)

Image: Parri Thomas

I think this may have been the first visiting orchestra (from outside the United Kingdom) I have heard in London since the before-times. The twin viruses of ‘Brexit’ and Covid have both played their part and will doubtless continue to make their baleful presence felt. At any rate, to have the Budapest Festival Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall playing Stravinsky seemed like a good sign that musical life in London was regaining a little lost ground. (Alas, as I type, I learn that Storm Eunice has done for this evening’s ENO premiere of The Cunning Little Vixen, but let us hope that will prove merely to have been postponed.)

The orchestra and Iván Fischer made as strong a case as I can imagine for Jeu de cartes (which, a little improbably, received its European premiere from the Staatskapelle Dresden under Karl Böhm). The three introductions to its three ‘deals’ were colourful, angular, motor rhythmic: just what one would hope for from neoclassical Stravinsky. The first offered especially fine woodwind playing, for instance in the principal flute’s solo. (She would also shine in Petrushka.) The second offered deceptively amiable chugging, just as the doctor ordered. There was, moreover, undeniable charm to be heard in the trapping of neo-Tchaikovskian melodies in Stravinsky’s unpitying straitjacket. Greater dramatic intensity came in the third, a reflection of work more than performance. Throughout, one could hear this was a ballet, and almost see the dancers, as if this were Prokofiev. There was a winning parade of ‘characters’ too. I cannot say it dispelled my suspicions of ultimate emptiness, but such is the quicksand of (some) neoclassical Stravinsky. 

Patricia Kopatchinskaja joined the orchestra for Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto. Her incisive, often aggressive solo playing seemed to bring back this neoclassical work to Russian roots many of us might never have suspected were present—certainly not to this degree. In that, the BFO and Fischer seemed more than willing partners. The two inner Arias proved surprisingly close in some respects to the Violin Concertos of Prokofiev, albeit—like those moments of Tchaikovsky in Jeu de Cartes—imprisoned within a polemically heartless cage of metronomic precision. Bitter-sweetness was to be heard from violin and woodwind soloists alike, the second Aria’s fuller sadness bringing the music intriguingly close to the final act of The Rake’s Progress. Bright, often balletic exuberance characterised the closing ‘Capriccio’. Certainly capricious, it offered a characterful opportunity for more ‘conventional’ virtuosity, finely taken. It was an intriguing performance, which took nothing for granted, and certainly had me rethink much of what I thought I had ‘known’ about this polemically strange work. As an encore, Kopatchinskaja offered us two of Bartók’s Duos for two violins, the excellent István Kádár her partner. 

Fischer made the strongest case I can recall hearing for the 1947 revision of Petrushka; or, so I initially thought. I do not mean to imply this was not a fine performance; it certainly was. Rather, I was increasingly unsure whether what I was hearing with surprise was down to Stravinsky or to Fischer. Perhaps it is better to say that the version of the score Fischer chose played to his strengths and to how he hears the work. The Shrovetide Fair music came across bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of colour and rhythmic bite, above all full of expectation. The musicians’ often extraordinary precision truly brought it to life. Again, there was no doubt this was a ballet (perhaps ironically, given the version concerned) and, in this case, both purged by the fire of intervening neoclassicism and brought back to life in knowledge of what had gone before. Perhaps that gave extra poignancy to the particularly icy murder of Petrushka. Characters danced before the mind’s eye and, most startling, rhythms pounded more remorselessly than in any other performance that springs to mind. This was worlds away from the very different post-Romanticisms of Gergiev and Boulez, perhaps closer to Stravinsky’s own way with the score. At any rate, what we heard was both animated and animating, blessed by splendid orchestral playing, and above all highly enjoyable.

Frang/BPO/Fischer - Bartók and Mendelssohn, 21 December 2017

Philharmonie

Bartók: Hungarian Peasant Songs, Sz 100

Bartók: Violin Concerto no.1, Sz 36
Mendelssohn: Selection from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opp.21 and 61: Overture and nos 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13

Vilde Frang (violin)

Mari Eriksmoen (soprano)

Kitty Whately (mezzo-soprano)

Ladies of the Philharmonia Chor Wien (chorus master: Walter Zeh)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Iván Fischer (conductor)

 

What struck me initially during the first of the two movements of Bartók’s 1933 version for orchestra of his Hungarian Peasant Songs was the sound of the Berlin Philharmonic. Many have commented, whether since the departure of Claudio Abbado, since that of Herbert von Karajan, even since the death of Wilhelm Furtwängler, on how the orchestra has lost ‘its’ sound. Depending on one’s standpoint, there is either a great deal of truth in that or there is none; or perhaps there is a third way too. Certainly the orchestral sound has not remained the same, but has that of any orchestra? Here, I heard – perhaps this has come from hearing the orchestra often over the past year, in the Philharmonie – what I might characterise as a ‘modern Berlin sound’, both in character, rich, deep, and yet translucent, and yet, almost paradoxically, if one is talking about ‘a sound’, adaptable, according not only to the music, but also to the conductor. Am I saying anything at all there? I am not sure, but I decided to mention it, since the thought struck me with some force.

The performance of that opening work sounded very much, well, as the opening to a concert, almost as if it were the aural opening of a storybook, which in a sense it was. Fantastical (at times) orchestration made the original material sound new, just as a Bach orchestration might, and yet, the ‘original’ was still there, just as with Bach. Moreover, one could hear where the later Bartók came from, too; affinities even with the Concerto for Orchestra presented themselves. If I occasionally found Iván Fischer a little laboured, keen to underline, less keen to suggest how the dances of the second movement might hang together, there was no denying the straightforward excellence of the Berlin Philharmonic’s playing – which, I think, Karajan and Abbado, perhaps even Furtwängler, as well, of course, as Simon Rattle, would happily have recognised. And the final dance was unmistakeably a climax.

Vilde Frang joined the orchestra for Bartók’s First Violin Concerto. Her initially haunting solo line truly drew one in to listen. Odd though this may be sound, I barely noticed to start with that other violinists, then other instrumentalists had joined her, such was the unanimity of purpose, almost as if the musicians were part of a giant orchestral keyboard. (I thought, then, of Boulez’s sur Incises, and of his work with this orchestra.) Chamber music thus blossomed into orchestral music, in a truly extraordinary way: all the time, so it seemed, led by the golden thread of a solo line, even when it had fallen silent. The second movement offered a vigorous response, very much in the manner, if not quite the style, of the later Bartók. Fast vibrato from Frang proved no obstacle to the surest of intonation, for her violin playing proved just as commanding as her broader musicianship. Musical connections with Prokofiev, even Szymanowski, suggested themselves, without this singular piece ever sounding quite ‘like’ anything other than itself.

 

I presume the programming of music from A Midsummer Night’s Dream was intended as a joke, given the date of the winter solstice. At any rate, it brightened the darkness of a Berlin winter. It is perhaps peculiarly difficult to speak of Mendelssohn’s music without resort to cliché. Words for the Overture – that perfect miracle, from a seventeen-year-old – present themselves all too readily, whether in work or performance: aetheral, gossamer, and so on. Those words certainly came to my mind more or less immediately, along with the recollection that Mendelssohn, so wisely, had once remarked that the problem with music was that it was more, not less, precise than words. Perhaps I should give up here, then, but I had better say something more. The aetheral strangeness of those opening chords actually put me in mind a little of Mahler: the chorale in the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, to be precise; the gossamer lightness of the Berlin strings’ response proved a true delight. And if Fischer, to begin with, sounded unduly Toscanini-like, harrying the score somewhat, he soon settled down. He understood – as many, surprisingly do not – that the end of the development here is, as often with Mendelssohn, a point of exhaustion, even if he somewhat overdid that exhaustion. It was, moreover, a joy to hear a full string section (fourteen first violins, down to six double basses) in this music. And who would not melt upon hearing those strings, or indeed Emmanuel Pahud’s flute in the recapitulation?

 

The Scherzo was as lithe as it had been under Abbado, and at least as full of woodland character (those clichés again, I know). This might sound banal, and perhaps it is, but I was moved to marvel, which I do perhaps less often than I should, at quite what a modern symphony orchestra can accomplish, and in particular at what this modern symphony orchestra can. I was taken a little by surprise at the German in ‘Ye spotted snakes’ or rather, ‘Bunte Schlangen, zweigezüngt!’ Schlegel’s celebrated translation has its own enchantments, though, as of course does Mendelssohn’s score. If I might have preferred a little more warmth initially from soprano, Mari Eriksomoen, that was certainly forthcoming from Kitty Whately and members of the Philahrmonia Chor Wien, who stood up from within the orchestra. And any reservation was more a matter of personal taste, or lack thereof, than anything else; these were fine vocal performances. Fischer let the music run away with him occasionally, but recovered well enough. Wordless drama characterised the Intermezzo, again bringing those Mendelssohnian thoughts concerning the ‘definiteness’ of music to mind. Delectable horns and woodwind came very much to the fore in the Nocturne, just as they must. Fischer’s way with it was slightly on the sectional side, but I should not exaggerate. There was, moreover, great passion to be heard from the strings. A resplendent and, yes, moving Wedding March prepared the way for the mysterious, quirky, Mahlerian foreshadowing of the Marcia funèbre. The final movement bound together various gossamer threads admirably. My only regret was that we had not had more of the music, and indeed the play itself. And there was ambiguity to those fairies too, especially in the delivery of their final line: 'Trefft ihn in der Dämmerung!’