Sir Neville Marriner’s 90th-Birthday Celebration Concert – Saint-Saëns, Mozart, and Elgar, 1 April 2014

Royal Festival Hall

Saint-Saëns – Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, op.28

Mozart – Piano Concerto no.20 in D minor, KV 466

Elgar – Enigma Variations, op.36

Joshua Bell (violin/director)

Murray Perahia (piano)

Academy of St Martin in the Fields

Sir Neville Marriner (conductor)

 

Image: Decca

 

 

Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (the ensemble’s initial hyphens dropped in 1988) have been performing together in public since 1959, though Marriner appeared as violinist on a good few recordings before then. Having founded the ensemble and guided it through a number of transformations – not least, its varying constitution as small ensemble, chamber orchestra, and symphony orchestra – Sir Neville, though no longer the Music Director, still plays an active part in the life of the ASMF as conductor. Often, sadly, that happens more often abroad than here in England; indeed, though I have often heard the orchestra, this was actually the first time I have heard the conductor ‘live’.  Two weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday, that was put right with a wonderful celebratory concert, including the present Music Director (only the second in the orchestra’s history), Joshua Bell, and Principal Guest Conductor, Murray Perahia.

 

Bell acted as soloist and director for his contribution, Saint-Saëns’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Perhaps surprisingly, it was here that the orchestra was at its smallest (strings: 7.6.4.3.2). It was a stylish performance, benefiting from razor-sharp unanimity and a keen sense of rhythm, without being driven too hard. There was plenty of light and shade, a credit both to the players’ responsiveness and to Bell’s enlightened direction. It was indeed a joy of sorts to hear such immaculate playing from all concerned. There is, of course, only so deep one can go in such a piece, but he ensured that it was not merely an opportunity for virtuoso display.

 

I had assumed that Perahia would be directing Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto from the piano, so was delighted when Marriner came to the podium to conduct. The string section here was larger, though still on what one might call a chamber scale (10.8. 6.6.3). More important than mere size, however, was the transparency of sound, allied to commendable fullness where need be (more so, I fancied, than on the ASMF recordings with Alfred Brendel). Doubtless Marriner’s detractors would consider this a failing, but I was quite delighted to hear the first movement open as if it were the same orchestra that had played for Amadeus. (The beautifully-illustrated programme had an amusing advertisement for that ‘motion picture’, with pictures of Mozart and Marriner: ‘Only two people were qualified to conduct the score of Milos Forman’s “Amadeus”. One was unavailable.’) The standard of orchestral execution was outstanding: sweet of tone, beguiling indeed, but with not a little demonic fury too. Such things are relative: this was not the Mozart of, say, Barenboim or Furtwängler, but nor was it trying to be. It was, however, a splendid display of fine musicianship from all concerned. Tempi and phrasing went unnoticed in the best sense: this was an excellent example of art concealing art. Perahia perhaps proved a little darker, even on occasion heavier of hand, than one might have expected, but for the most part, his was a fine performance too. The cadenzas – I do not know whose they were: certainly not Beethoven’s – here and in the finale were imaginative and received fine advocacy. The slow movement was poised, rightly, between tragedy and consolation, making one feel both all the more, without a hint of exaggeration. It was beautifully shaped, without sounding ‘shaped’. Perahia offered a considerable degree of ornamentation. Clean lines and characterful woodwind (not least, Christopher Cowie’s oboe) added to an account that was far more than ‘pleasing’. Coughing, alas, extended until the end of Perahia’s opening solo to the finale. Nevertheless, it was expertly played: a very tricky moment indeed to bring off. Then the ASMF truly unleashed Mozart’s D minor daemon, whilst remaining clean, clear, and lithe: this was never going to be a performance of Furtwänglerian mysticism, but it convinced on its own terms. There was just the right degree of tension between minor and major, the coda proving a delightful release.

 

A larger orchestra again (strings 12.10.8.8.6) convened following the interval for Elgar’s Enigma Variations. I was struck immediately by the cultivated sound of the strings: not for its own sake, but at the service of the score and its subtleties. Fabled virtuosity and transparency were once again apparent, often evoking Mendelssohn, indeed as early as the Theme and certainly in the first variation. This was not ‘weighty’ Elgar, but nor was it ‘light’ in any trivial sense. And there was plenty of depth to the string tone where required, as for instance in the fourth variation, ‘WMB’. Tumultuous passages were taken at quite a lick, yet never sounded merely quick; there was bravado here, but musical bravado. ‘He who dares wins’: and he did. Moreover, there was plenty of what, in traditionally gendered terms, not inappropriate in Elgar’s case, we might call ‘feminine’ contrast. Crucially, there was never so much as a hint of sentimentality. ‘Nimrod’  was deeply felt, yes, but musicianship was all. ‘Dorabella’ brought lightly-worn Mendelssohn and Brahms to the fore, maybe even a hint of Strauss. ‘GRS’ perhaps Liszt – and not only in the use of the triangle. But the composer’s voice remained ever present, whoever his forebears may have been.

 

This was a distinguished performance, a fitting celebration of a distinguished career. Let us look forward, then, to a similar occasion in ten years’ time. And lest the thought seem absurd – maybe it is, maybe it is not – let us remember Elliott Carter, whom no one would have expected to continue composing into his second century.

 

Bell/LPO/Jurowski - Mozart, Brahms, Zemlinsky, and Szymanowski, 22 February 2012

Royal Festival Hall

Mozart – Symphony no.32, KV 318
Brahms – Violin Concerto in D major, op.77
Zemlinsky – Psalm no.23, op.14
Szymanowski – Symphony no.3, ‘The Song of the Night’

Joshua Bell (violin)
Jeremy Ovenden (tenor)
London Philharmonic Choir (chorus master: Neville Creed)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

A peculiar programme, this, in which it was difficult to discern much of a connection between the first and second halves. But there was much to enjoy, and only one work – or rather, part of one work – proved a little disappointing. Saddeningly if predictably, audience acclaim tended to be in inverse proportion to the success of the performance; indeed, quite a few audience members did not even bother to stay for the second half.

Mozart’s thirty-second symphony received for the most part a splendid reading. It was heartening to see Vladimir Jurowski employ a sensible, if hardly excessive, complement of London Philharmonic strings: 10.10.8.6.4. If only he had not deigned to employ natural trumpets and ‘period’ kettledrums – though not, curiously, natural horns. (He did the same last year, in a performance of Haydn’s eighty-eighth.) Nevertheless, the first section combined liveliness and grandeur, non-fussy articulation and a sense of drama. The Andante section flowed without being harried, breathing the outdoor air of the serenade, as well as its easy-going charm, whilst the reversion to the initial tempo brought with it a proper sense of return. It was just a pity that the kettledrums sounded like dustbin lids: I can imagine what Beecham would have said…

Joshua Bell joined the orchestra for Brahms’s Violin Concerto. The first movement could be accounted an unalloyed success, its orchestral introduction – ‘introduction’ hardly seems appropriate here – beautifully handled by Jurowski: well-phrased, mellifluous, clear of purpose. Bell’s tone proved silvery and golden by turn, the latter coming to predominate, always perfectly centred upon the notes. However, he could show vehemence where required, though even then it would be exquisitely shaded. And how the second subject sang – both from soloist and orchestra! Form was clear, as it should be, but without turning into a mere formula; there was always, for which Jurowski must surely be credited, a keen sense of the organic to Brahms’s progress. Bell should be applauded for trying out his own cadenza but, alas, it proved no match for Joachim’s. As for the rest of the movement, though, I could find no fault whatsoever; nor should I have wished to do so. It was unfortunate, to say the least, that an alarm of some sort coincided with the opening bar of the slow movement. But the real problem, or rather one of the two real problems, was the tempo: it simply sounded too fast for an Adagio, and more importantly, too fast for this Adagio. The opening, moreover, emerged a little too moulded in Jurowski’s hands. Bell seemed at times simply to be trying too hard. One could not fault his playing as violin playing, but his seeming insistence to wring out the last drop of intensity from every phrase became a little too much: Brahms veered dangerously close to Korngold, and Bell’s approach seemed strangely at odds with Jurowski’s. The finale was ideally paced: there was clearly much for the audience to enjoy and, I dare say, to swoon over, but a little less would have been more for me. Bell’s approach seemed better suited to lovers of violin virtuosity than Brahms, but if you consider Brahms an out-and-out Romantic, closer to Paganini than to Schoenberg, you would probably have thought differently. Even I, however, wearied a little of the intensity of his vibrato. It all seemed a great pity, since the first movement had promised so much, but sections of the audience whistled and hollered nevertheless.

The second half was what had attracted me to the concert in the first place. Performances of Zemlinsky’s setting of the twenty-third psalm and Szymanowski’s third symphony do not come along every day; indeed, I had heard neither in concert before. Zemlinsky’s piece is an endearing oddity, at least to me, since I cannot help but find some of the music at odds with the text. But Jurowski, the LPO, and the London Philharmonic Choir gave it a wonderful performance, probably finer than any recording I have heard. The opening offered nicely pastoral woodwind, responded to by a fine, rich-toned viola solo (guest principal, Jonathan Barritt), before the ‘heavenly’ Mahler-ish (Fourth Symphony) music took over. Jurowski proved adept at bringing out affinities not only with Mahler, but also with early Schoenberg – though it is not always clear who is influencing whom in the latter case. Whatever its oddities, the psalm was magically brought to life by all concerned, never more so than in the heavenly final bars (Mahler’s Fourth again).

Szymanowski’s Third Symphony is, I think, a masterpiece, quite on a level with Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony and indeed the Polish composer’s own King Roger. It has much in common with the latter work, not least its sumptuous scoring and harmony, and of course its homoeroticism. Here, in this Song of the Night, Szymanowski responds to the verse of the thirteenth-century Persian mystic, Jalāl’ad-Dīn Rumi, and how he responds! If the opening bars are richly perfumed, and they certainly were in performance, then we soon hear something akin to an orchestral magic carpet. (Please forgive the orientalism, but it is more or less unavoidable in so orientalist a work.) If not quite possessing the sumptuousness of Boulez’s recent recording with the Vienna Philharmonic – surely now a first choice, though Rattle’s CBSO reading remains very fine indeed – then Jurowski’s LPO account still managed for the most part to emerge victorious over the Royal Festival Hall acoustic. The organ-founded climaxes, not always ideally prepared, packed quite a punch, but it was the Debussyan and Tristan-esque magic that truly ravished, for which conductor, orchestra, and choir were equally responsible. More than once, a progression recalled the Zemlinsky psalm too, but that seems most likely to have been coincidence and shared influence rather than direct connection. Ecstasy, when it came, proved quite overwhelming. Londoners will soon have a second opportunity to hear the symphony, when Boulez will conduct a performance with the LSO: doubtless not to be missed, but nor was this.

Joshua Bell/Sam Haywood, 29 April 2010

Wigmore Hall

Mozart – Violin Sonata in B-flat major, KV 454
Beethoven – Violin Sonata no.7 in C minor, op.30 no.2
Ravel – Violin Sonata in G major
Tchaikovsky – ‘Méditation’ from Souvenir d’un lieu cher, op.42
Sarasate – Introduction and Tarantella, op.43

Joshua Bell (violin)
Sam Haywood (piano)

The programme above, with Mozart and Beethoven sonatas in the first part and the other pieces in the second, looked odd on paper and proved so in practice. Performances were split accordingly, with distinctly unimpressive Classical works followed by a much improved second group following the interval.

The Mozart sonata, KV 454, opened promisingly, with a properly expansive Largo introduction. Joshua Bell applied nice touches of portamento and generally phrased well. Thereafter – and this set the pattern for the rest of the sonata – the tempo was simply too fast; Mozart reacts poorly to being hurried. Sam Haywood’s rendition of the piano part had its moments of passion, but there was too much Meissen china. Likewise, Bell had some fine moments, not least some beautiful playing on the G string, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts. The slow movement was more song than aria, its piano part strikingly matter of fact, nowhere more so than in the startling prosaic broken chords; what magic should be here. Greater pathos emerged with the turn to the minor mode, but it was not fully integrated. I am not sure I have ever heard so fast an Allegretto as the finale; it sounded more akin to an Allegro – at least. Where the conclusion to this movement should astonish in the diminution of note values, so fast a tempo pre-empted surprise. It was not just a matter of tempo; there was an impetuous, even showy aggression that sounded quite out of place in Mozart. As Stravinsky once commented on a typically hard-driven Solti performance, ‘Mozart is poorer than that’. By which, of course, he meant that Mozart is richer than that.

The Beethoven sonata likewise opened promisingly, with a sense of ebb and flow. It quickly became clear, however, that Beethovenian cragginess would be conspicuous by its absence, the performance veering between Romantic-virtuosic show and pseudo-eighteenth-century preciousness. In the slow movement, Haywood’s piano opening utterly lacked the requisite noble simplicity. Phrases were fussily broken up and the tempo was once again too fast, extraordinarily so for a movement marked Adagio cantabile: this sounded like an Andante – at least. The Beethovenian sublime was nowhere to be heard. Playful and aggressive, the scherzo marked a noteworthy improvement, though it was rather late in the day and arguably overdone. The finale proved excessively, externally ‘passionate’, leaving little room for structural backbone. As with much of the sonata, it never sounded like Beethoven.

Ravel celebratedly disdained interpretation in favour of performance, at least in terms of his music. A pose? Perhaps, but he certainly permits less license, seemingly benefiting this duo, who instantly sounded more at home in Ravel’s G major violin sonata. Bell’s tone was straightforwardly gorgeous, and, more to the point, appropriate to the work. The modal piano passages sounded midway between the Middle Ages and the jazz age – which is to say, they sounded Ravelian. Perhaps the performance was a bit smooth at times, but it marked a great improvement. The slow movement was more bluesy, less Romantic than is often the case: nothing wrong with that. There was aggression too, some of the violin part sounding startlingly, revealingly close to Bartók, for the music, thank goodness, was never sentimentalised. The finale brought a similar kinship to the G major Piano Concerto and furthered that tension, as opposed to collaboration, between piano and violin: a hallmark of the sonata as a whole.

Tchaikovsky’s Méditation sounded, at its best, like a missing aria from Eugene Onegin, though there were strange moments of disconnection between violin and piano: perhaps a hangover from the Ravel? Bell took the opportunity nevertheless to lavish his rich tone, upon the music, greatly to its benefit. As for Sarasate’s Introduction and Tarantella, the piece does not amount to anything much, but nor does it outstay its welcome. Bell despatched it as to the manor born. Every difficulty thrown at him he turned into an opportunity, evincing a true stylistic affinity lacking in the first ‘half’ of the programme. In a nod to this year’s Chopin anniversary, the players gave an encore arrangement of the C-sharp minor Nocturne. On this evidence, the music gains nothing and loses a great deal from such arrangement, but Bell gave his admirers further opportunity to swoon.

Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk, Wigmore Hall, 26 March 2009

Wigmore Hall

Janáček – Sonata for violin and piano
Brahms – Sonata for violin and piano no.3 in D minor, op.108
Ysaÿe – Sonata for solo violin in A minor, op.27 no.2, ‘Obsession’
Franck – Sonata for violin and piano in A major

Joshua Bell (violin)
Jeremy Denk (piano)

Ultimately this proved a frustrating recital. It boasted many good thing, yet not only did they fail to come together as a convincing whole, but one also became aware of a number of artistic limitations, particularly with respect to Joshua Bell’s performance.

Janáček’s violin sonata is, at the best of times, not an easy work to render coherent. Here, Bell often seemed to act more as a soloist than as a chamber musician, which, given his experience in the world of chamber music, came as something of a surprise. He looked at his partner, Jeremy Denk, far more when the violin was silent than when called upon to play, whereas Denk proved extremely attentive. There could be no faulting the technique of either musician but Bell was rather too ready, especially during the opening movement, to employ a seemingly all-purpose Romantic tone. Denk sounded more alert to the idiosyncrasies of the composer’s style. He provided a nicely rippling opening to the following Ballada. Though still somewhat on the Romantic side, Bell now seemed more sensitive to shifts of mood – and Romanticism is probably more appropriate to this movement in any case. Shades of Debussyan harmony were brought out, and with a good dose of passion rather than haze. The third movement was strongly characterised by fragments of distorted dance rhythms, reminiscent of the troika music in Katya Kabanova and looking forward also to the Sinfonietta. Bell’s double-stopping was flawless, although the music did not always seem to have penetrated under his skin. The fourth movement had a real sense of chamber music, the musical ‘lead’ passed between the instruments according to the imperatives of work and performance. I very much liked the musical question marks posed by the uncertain violin interventions, not least that with which the sonata ended. Denk provided arresting piano tremolos, igniting a passionate response from both musicians in an unsuccessful – which is as it should be – attempt to climax.

The third of Brahms’s violin sonatas opened once again with an uncertainty of idiom. Denk’s role here was once again more impressive, presenting clear textures without loss to the piano part’s complex richness. By contrast, Bell’s tone often sounded inappropriately light. At home with the lyrical side of Brahms’s inspiration – Bell can certainly spin a long line – the reading often lacked depth, although the half-light of the first movement’s coda provided subtly menacing shadows. The following Adagio was presented as a song without words: not without a proto-Elgarian nobility but rarely penetrating to the intricacies of Brahms’s serial foreshadowings. The third movement fared better. Its ghostliness was possessed of an unusual serenity, albeit punctuated by truly Romantic outbursts. There was an almost Schumannesque schizophrenia, within certain bounds, rendering the scherzo more of a Romantic ‘character piece’, or perhaps dual character piece, than is usually the case. In the finale, Denk proved adept at reminding us of the echoes of the previous movement. Yet, here the welcome clarity he brought to his part was married to an undue lightness of tone. He sounded a little too Mendelssohnian. Bell’s rendition of the violin part was technically flawless but I wanted a greater rawness, if not of tone, then at least of emotion.

Where Bell really did come into his own was in the solo Ysaÿe sonata. The opening Prélude brought forth immediate echoes of Bach, leading into a duly obsessive hearing of the Dies irae chant. The fascinating second movement, Malinconia, seemed somehow – and without taking the obvious route of eschewing vibrato – to evoke the mid-Baroque world of melancholy Affekt. There was nothing showy to Bell’s performance; indeed, it proved unfailingly musical. The Dies irae here sounded as if refracted through the evocation of a consort of viols. After the sweet pizzicato opening of the following Danse des ombres, there was again something intriguingly alte about the ensuing Musik, a splendid antidote to the glossiness of so many performances of such repertoire. The music then grew into something more Romantic, as if the listener were being taken on a guided tour of the history of the violin, with an appropriate nod to Paganini at the appropriate juncture. This led seamlessly into the final movement, Les Furies, in which Bell could prove himself the very model of a modern violin virtuoso, whilst hinting at a modernism, especially of harmony and its implications, often overlooked in the music of Ysaÿe.

Franck’s sonata proved, like much of what had gone before, something of a curate’s egg. Denk imparted a surprisingly impressionistic tinge to his opening bars, the harmonies sounding stranger than usual. However, the first movement as a whole lacked the necessary security of harmonic direction, veering between those intriguing, if ultimately not quite convincing, hints of Debussy and a somewhat over-the-top Romanticism. One might well say that Franck’s elusive idiom lies somewhere in between the two; perhaps so, but it does not really lie in alternation between them. Bell’s violin often sounded disconnected from the piano part, not in the sense of a lack of synchronisation but rather as if he were playing to a pre-recorded ‘accompaniment’. The second movement opened with a wonderfully Tristan-esque bent to the melodic lines, to some extent prefigured before but now given fuller – and convincing – rein. Romanticism was spot on in this case, although the central section sounded, ironically, more like Brahms in D minor than much of Brahms in D minor had. I liked the improvisatory feeling to the beginning of the Recitative-Fantasia, evocative of the organist ‘preluding’ upon previous given themes. However, even at his most ardent, Bell’s lyricism was not really matched by sufficient depth of tone. If the musicians were not entirely able to mask the repetitive nature of Franck’s cyclical form here and in the finale, the fault is not really theirs. One again had a sense in the final movement of a soloist and accompanist rather than true chamber music. This was not entirely Bell’s fault, for there were times when Denk could have been rather less delicately reticent. As so often in this recital, the whole was not a great deal more than the sum of its variable parts.