Salzburg Festival (4) – Ottensamer/Camerata Salzburg/Viotti: Bartók, Weber, Koncz, and Kodály, 17 August 2019

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Sz 106

Weber: Clarinet Concerto no.1 in F minor, op.73

Stephan Koncz: Hungarian Fantasy on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, for clarinet and orchestra

Kodály: Dances of Galánta

Andreas Ottensamer (clarinet)

Camerata Salzburg

Lorenzo Viotti (conductor)

A deeply frustrating concert, this: a fine orchestra and fine soloist, let down by odd programming and, more seriously, a conductor who only intermittently impressed. Mine, it is fair to see, was very much a minority view, the audience rising to give Lorenzo Viotti a standing ovation.

Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta opened with great promise, its first movement involving and intriguing. Musically, it was the highpoint of the concert, though the Weber First Clarinet Concerto, a considerably lesser work, could hardly be faulted in performance terms. Veiled yet clear from the outset, the Camerata Salzburg strings grew in muted – and then non-muted – intensity. Viotti guided them with skill and evident commitment, Bartók’s structure readily becoming form. There was a welcome physicality to the second movement, not only concerning rhythmic impact but of bows on strings: once again, the orchestra was on superlative fault. Corners, however, were more of a difficulty, Viotti communicating little of how the movement’s sections were connected, a problem that only increased throughout this admittedly difficult work. Eerie ‘night music’ passages registered vividly in the third movement, which, to be fair, also generated a good deal of harmonic and dramatic suspense, so long as one listened only a section at a time. There was a welcome sense of the dance to the finale, or at least to its opening. Overall line, however, eluded me.

Joined by Andreas Ottensamer for the Weber concerto, the orchestra and Viotti gave what was overall their most satisfying performance. Some might have found Viotti’s moulding of the first movement’s Romantic drama a little much, but it was a perfectly justifiable aesthetic stance to take, evoking responses from Ottensamer both surpassingly virtuosic and intensely dramatic. Phrasing and articulation here and in the remaining two movements were splendidly judged, the slow movement characterised by deeply-felt lyricism, tone variegated without affection, the finale winningly propelled with an Italianate verve that may not have been especially profound, but which was very much in keeping with music that neither asks for nor requires profundity. For Weber music that does, we turns generally to the final three operas, a flash from which – Der Freischütz – opened Stephan Koncz’s Hungarian Fantasy on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. As a vehicle for Ottensamer’s virtuosity, it did its trick. Musically, it seemed to me quite without interest, mostly written in a language that would hardly have been avant-garde two hundred years earlier. Not everything need be Helmut Lachenmann, but it is difficult to imagine Weber writing straightforwardly in the style of Monteverdi, minus the content. It went on for too long simply to be a throwaway encore.

As for Kodály’s Dances of Galánta, they have their fans; I remain uncertain quite why. At any rate, they seem dangerous to programme alongside a Bartók masterpiece. Camerata Salzburg’s playing was again beyond reproach, impeccable in balance and blend, heft and subtlety. Viotti responded well to the needs of characterisation. I am not sure his habit of pulling them around did them any favours either, nor his placing emphasis so strongly on the ‘Romantic’ side. They are what they are, though, and the audience clearly enjoyed them, as it did the encore: a swashbuckling account of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance no.1 in G minor.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (1), ‘L’Alto à l’honneur’ – Loeffler, Bray, Liszt, Kodály, and Brahms, 13 July 2018

Conservatoire Darius Milhaud

Charles Martin Loeffler: Quatre poèmes, op.5

Charlotte Bray: In Black Light (world premiere)

Liszt: Romance oubliée, S 132

Kodály: Adagio for viola and piano

Brahms: Zwei Gesänge, op.91

Tabea Zimmermann (viola)

Andrea Hill (soprano)

Edwige Herchenroder (piano)

An oddly patchy concert, this: alongside the most unidiomatic professional Liszt performance I can recall and only intermittently successful Brahms, we heard a highly convincing world premiere and fine performances of two other works hitherto unknown to me: one indeed written by a composer of whom I had not previously heard. That composer was Charles Martin Loeffler, one of the works his Quatre poèmes, op.5 of 1893. Or should that have been Karl Martin Loeffler? So consumed with hatred, it seems, had the young Karl been for Germany that, even following his emigration to the USA, he would claim to have been born not Prussian but Alsatian and changed his name accordingly. Quatre poèmes was doubtless chosen because it would involve all three musicians performing in this concert, but it seemed to me on a single hearing fully to justify inclusion on merit. One heard, aptly enough, what seemed to be a largely yet not exclusively German sense of harmony with a more French taste in verse, melody, and sometimes texture too. The first song, a setting of Baudelaire’s La Cloche fêlée, seemed to mediate both as work and performance between Duparc and Brahms, Tabea Zimmermann’s viola-playing – Loeffler was an early enthusiast for the viola d’amore – becoming more Romantically ardent as the piece demanded or suggested. It offered development in a more conventionally instrumental sense, yet seemed also to have something of a Franco-Flemish (Franck, perhaps soon Debussy too) taste for the cyclical. It certainly convinced, moreover, as a response to the poem. The Verlaine ‘Dansons la gigue’ was gypsy-like – at least in a nineteenth-century sense – whilst also seemingly responding to Carmen in its more reflective moments. Verlaine was the poet for the remaining two pieces too. An atmosphere of general sadness, relieved somewhat by finely spun piano arabesques from Edwige Herchenrode, characterised ‘Le Son du cor s’afflige vers les bois’. The vocal line in the closing ‘Sérénade’, and Andrea Hill’s delivery of it, hinted at la vieille France, but this was no pastiche, instead a dramatic evocation of another time, ‘mandoline’ and all. I even fancied there were suggestions of the darker Ravel: presentiments, though, given the date. Fascinating: I shall be keen to hear more Loeffler.

I have always been keen to hear more Charlotte Bray too. The world premiere of In Black Light, for solo viola, furthered that keenness. It struck me as having some aspects of variational form – developing variation if you will, but also something more ‘traditional’ than that – within an overarching framework that has something of what would once have called a tone poem to it. Rhythms and intervals help generate style and idea. Following a grave opening of (relative) pitch extremes, a broad canvas emerges, upon which composer and performer alike offer a commanding variety of musical strokes: one section ‘jagged and fiery’ (Bray), another ‘a kind of broken waltz’, another ‘a mysterious pizzicato miniature’, and so on: related yet contrasting. The rhythmic profile is certainly sharp – and was certainly sharp in Zimmermann’s commanding performance, clearly highly attuned to the work’s contours and expressive requirements. The opening theme’s return did indeed sound, to quote the composer again, ‘urgently present and expressively charged’.

Liszt’s Romance oubliée has always seemed to me – perhaps unsurprisingly – superior in its piano solo version. That, however, is no reason to shun any of its others, especially when ‘actual’ Liszt chamber music is so thin on the ground, the composer’s tendency being, not unlike Wagner’s, to write chamber music within works for larger forces. The opening solo line certainly suits the viola, yet this proved for violist and pianist alike a strangely constricted performance, tentative to the point of incoherence. Kodály’s Adagio, first written for violin, then arranged for viola, proved much more Zimmermann and Herchenroder’s thing. Its darkly Romantic opening sounded almost Elgarian – at least to this Englishman. Zimmermann spun a rich, yet far from indulgent line, which enabled the material to develop in far from predictable fashion. If her pianist seemed very much the ‘accompanist’, she performed well in that role. As she did in the two closing Brahms songs; to begin with, indeed, we might have been about to hear a newly discovered sonata for viola and piano. Taken as a whole, though, those performances might have been more attuned to the songs’ form. Lack of direction, even meandering, married to a reticent way with the words (Rückert’s) from Hill sometimes made for heavy Brahmsian weather. If only they had been performed as if written by Loeffler.

Uchida/Grosz/BPO/Rattle - Mozart, Walton, and Kodály, 6 October 2017

Philharmonie

Mozart: Piano Concerto no.27 in B-flat major, KV 595

Walton: Viola Concerto

Kodály: Suite: Háry János

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

Amihai Grosz (viola)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

Try as I might, I could not work out the idea behind the programming of this concert. In practice, it brought us the Berlin Philharmonic – and Simon Rattle – at their best after the interval, in works by Walton and Kodály, whereas far and away the best music came before that interval. Not that there was anything wrong with the orchestra’s playing, or indeed with Rattle’s conducting, in Mozart’s final piano concerto, but there was something of a sense of compromise, as if orchestra and conductor – arguably soloist too – were pulling slightly in different directions. There was none, or very little, of the mannerism that has often so disfigured Rattle’s conducting of Classical music; that, after all, is hardly Mitsuko Uchida’s style. But a very small orchestra – only eight first violins – sounded a little plain of string tone, with the true orchestral delights coming from a fabulous woodwind section. The first movement lacked the autumnal quality puritans tell us we – and it – should eschew, but nor was it especially vernal; indeed, even Uchida’s playing, although excellent, had a degree of neutrality to it. That worked rather well in the development section, when her passagework sounded entwined around ravishing oboe and bassoon solos. Indeed, the orchestra had sounded enlivened as soon as she entered. And Uchida’s was a distinguished performance overall, as one would have expected. The slow movement was beautifully shaped, never unduly moulded. It spoke and sang with simplicity, however secondary. Here, Uchida continued to ornament her lines, but far more so than earlier on: ever tasteful, indeed ever delightful. The finale was finely articulated from all concerned, Uchida’s command of line especially noteworthy. There was much to commend, much to enjoy; comparisons can wait until another day, or indefinitely.

The Berlin Philharmonic sounded like a different orchestra after the interval; of course one would not expect Mozart to sound like Walton, or vice versa, but it was more than that. Richly Romantic, there was no denying this sound’s ‘fit’ to the repertoire. (Interestingly, and to my mind highly surprisingly, Karl Böhm had conducted its Berlin Philharmonic premiere in 1958, with William Primrose, whilst the 1961-2 revision, heard here, received its first – and until now, only – performance from the orchestra in 1969 from Giusto Cappone and John Barbirolli). Just two weeks earlier, we had heard Máté Szűcs in the Bartók Viola Concerto; now it was the turn of the orchestra’s other principal viola, Amihai Grosz. If the Bartók is far from my favourite piece by that composer, comparison with Walton’s concerto, in whichever version, does the latter no favours. If, once again, I found myself far from convinced by a work that has a tendency to sound like bits of film music stuck together, then it was not for want of trying from Grosz, the orchestra, or Rattle. The vaguely jazzy sections and those that sound somewhat like Prokofiev are perhaps the most convincing parts of the first movement; they certainly sounded splendid in themselves here. Grosz’s double-stopping, moreover, was to die for. Stravinskian rhythmic precision made its mark in the second movement. All concerned made a great effort to unify the work in its finale. Grosz’s lyricism here – and not just his – made a gorgeous sound indeed. His Reger encore, however – I am not sure offhand from which of the Suites it came – was very much more to my taste. It was lovely to see Rattle sneak in at the back of the stage and sit at the piano to hear it too.

I tried too with Kodály’s Háry Janos Suite. Perhaps trying was the problem, for it is fun enough in its way, if perhaps a little laboured in the fifth movement. The Prelude is in many ways impressive – and certainly proved so in performance, lower strings offering more than a hint of Bluebeard Bartók (in which I had heard them earlier this year). There are worse models, far worse models! The festive quality to the Vienna Musical Clock movement was relished. And violist Naoko Shimizu played her opening to the third movement, the ‘Song’, with a beauty of tone that, in context, hinted at a link, however, strained, with Walton. It is always fun – well, nearly always – to hear the cimbalom too, and we most certainly did on this occasion, if rather less imaginatively (writing, not performance) than I had earlier this week in Jörg Widmann’s Zweites Labyrinth. The Berlin brass’s performance was truly outstanding in ‘The Battle and Defeat of Napoleon’, and so on. It was an enjoyable performance in itself; quite what its connection with Walton or Mozart might have been remained obscure.