MCO/Uchida - Mozart and Janáček, 1 February 2025

Royal Festival Hall, London, 1.2.2025 (MB)

Mozart: Piano Concerto no.18 in B-flat major, KV 456
Janáček: Mládi for wind sextet
Mozart: Piano Concerto no.21 in C major, KV 467

Mitsuko Uchida (piano, director)
Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Mitsuko Uchida’s series of Mozart piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra reaches nos 18 and 21, on this occasion sandwiching an outstanding performance from MCO soloists of Janáček’s Mládi. If KV 456 took a little time to settle – its first movement a little too ‘neutral’ in character – then its later movements and the whole of KV 467 witnessed pianist and orchestra alike on excellent form. 

B-flat major is a funny key. My ears ‘tuned’ by orchestral tuning, I could not help but notice its flatter character. Even beyond that, though, that first movement sounded somewhat subdued. The MCO strings offered more extroverted playing in some tutti passages; there were gains too in the intimacy and the need properly to listen. It was only later on, though, that I really felt the music’s inherent drama, though tempo and balance could not be faulted. A barrage of coughing notwithstanding, the opening of the slow movement suggested the subtle tragedy of a great seria aria, and that sense only increased with its passage. There have doubtless been more overtly Romantic readings, but the MCO’s relative understatement did not undersell; nor did Uchida’s dignified response, voice-leading and harmony already pointing toward Mozart’s later years. Orchestral Furies vied with Orphic pleas, leading to a mesmerising close in which time stood still and once again moved—for it could do no other. In the best sense, that drama hung over a finale that truly smiled – rarest of delights – though sterner moments were equally moving. A slip from Uchida went for little; if anything it enhanced the sense of deeply human music-making. 

It is difficult not to regret a relative lack of concert music from Janáček, though certainly not at the cost of his operas. In any case, Mládi showed us how intimately connected are both ‘sides’ to his output, the music breathing the air of the late operas, instruments assuming the roles of dramatic characters, as if in anticipation of the music theatre of composers such as Birtwistle. As characteristic as it was compelling, a kaleidoscope of emotions was unleashed in the first movement, only to be added to or deepened in its successors. The second emerged as if the composer’s counterpart to that in the preceding piano concerto, its multiplicity of inflections and incitements, moods both shifting and abruptly changing, highly dramatic throughout. As bubbly as they were mysterious, the third and fourth were not only dramatically consequent but blessed by tremendous, unfailingly eloquent wind playing. 

The C major Piano Concerto, KV 467, had the second half to itself. From the off, the orchestra – still on the small side – sounded more energised than at the start of the earlier concerto, as did Uchida’s direction. A larger wind section made its presence felt, as did the commitment of the MCO strings—and of course Mozart’s (natural) trumpets and drums. Phrasing, mood, detail: all came into grater focus. Mozart’s oscillation between major and minor structured an emotionally engaging tonal drama, replete, where called for, with imperious C major ‘public’ grandeur. I assume the cadenza, conceived on a grander scale and inflected with greater modernity than those for the B-flat concerto, was Uchida’s own; at any rate, I did not recognise it. 

In the slow movement, the strings again were at least equal partners, whether in their celebrated pizzicato passages or bowed music with meaningfully varied vibrato. A black and white pearl, one might say, of a movement. The tempo, if a little faster than once might have been the case, felt right. Mozart’s music sang and bewitched, in a performance that seemed to conceive his writing in a single breath. At times, I found the finale just a little hard-driven, at others, it scampered delightfully. Uchida’s collegial music-making – rarely did I think of her as a ‘soloist’ – nonetheless proved throughout a treat.

Musikfest Berlin (4) - Prohaska/MCO/Manacorda - Ives, Kloke, Mahler, and Dvořák, 5 September 2024

Philharmonie

Ives, arr. Eberhard Kloke: Seven Songs from the collection ‘114 Songs’ (world premiere)
Kloke: The Answered Question, op.131 (world premiere)
Mahler, arr. Kloke: Seven Early Songs
Dvořák: Symphony no.9 in E minor, op.95, B.178, ‘From the New World’

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Images copyright: Berliner Festspiele / Fabian Schellhorn

Musikfest Berlin’s focus on the Ives sesquicentenary continued with two commissions from Eberhard Kloke, one an arrangement of seven Ives songs for soprano and chamber orchestra, the other ‘an alternative experimental arrangement’ of Ives’s The Unanswered Question, ‘in which a differently posed question from Ives’s work is answered anew’. Kloke’s compositional activity, long focused on existing music by other composers – as conductor and composer alike, he considers himself above all an ‘interpreter’ – here also took in his arrangements of seven early songs by Mahler, dedicated, like those of Ives, to Anna Prohaska. 

In all three cases, ‘originals’ drifted in and out of consciousness: sometimes straightforwardly present, sometimes changed (whether by arrangement or otherwise), sometimes as underlay, and sometimes as a starting-point for other music by either composer. Ives’s own mysterious piano opening to ‘Thoreau’ prefaced, as in the original song, the spoken voice, ultimately leading to our first hearing of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s wind, directed by Antonello Manacorda, melodrama turning into song. Here, as elsewhere, Kloke’s orchestration proved sympathetic for voice and original material, musical and verbal. ‘Élegie’ offered a taste of Ives in French, both composers seemingly responding in kind, Kloke’s use of cello pizzicato almost more harp-like than the also present harp. His chamber writing permitted Prohaska to scale down her voice in singing of great subtlety that could also soar to climax—and did. Sharper-edged sonorities and harmonies in ‘His Exaltation’; a keen sense of the waters in ‘Grantchester’; and a jaunty, unmistakeably Americanism – accent to match, spoken and sung, with and without microphone – in ‘Charlie Rutlage’ were among other highlights, leading us to the closing question, already familiar from the encore to a song recital a few nights earlier: ‘Is life anything like that?’ 

Other questions, actually posed and might-have-beens, emerged in The Answered Question, partly submerged by a barrage of audience coughs. The MCO’s performance drew one in to listen, as did the spatial arrangement: two trumpets above, winds below, a further group (flute, oboe, clarinet, piano) at the back of the latter, as if in limbo. Questioning was questioned, as indeed was that questioning of question, in what came across as a post-transcendentalist refusal to accept easy answers, and accompanying unease as a result. Manacorda’s balancing and reconciliation of the instrumental parts proceeded with an ease belying the difficulty of his task, patient direction amply rewarded.  

For the Sieben frühe Lieder, title echoing Berg and perhaps Berio too, cowbells appeared: a temptation doubtless too difficult to resist. Here, Kloke offered quotation, allusion (thematic and timbral), and perhaps also illusion from Mahler’s Wunderhorn symphonies, already closely related to his song output, to produce a work I should guess extended to about twice the length of the songs alone. As the work progressed, memory, accurate and faulty, increasingly played a role of its own. A ‘Bruder Martin’ introduction to ‘Nicht wiedersehen!’ albeit with celesta and harp alongside double bass (first solo then duo) set the scene, the klezmer music of the First Symphony’s third movement joining later, surfacing in a way not dissimilar to that of the Mahler material in Berio’s Sinfonia. Saxophone was but one of the other instruments to be heard, all beautifully, expertly played by the musicians of the MCO; just as welcome, Prohaska treated the songs throughout as songs, not as would-be arias. The posthorn solo from the Third Symphony unsettled ‘Es ritten drei Reiter’. A purely vocal, folksong-like opening to ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’, elicited a sly instrumental response again evoking the First Symphony. Sleighbells from the Fourth framed ‘Das Mägdlein trat aus dem Fischerhaus’. The idea of resurrection, capitalised and otherwise, helped shape ‘Selbstgefühl’. It made for an unexpected, fascinating journey, and a surprisingly apt bridge between Ives and Dvořák.

 

Hearing the ‘New World’ Symphony from a chamber orchestra is different; it would be idle to pretend otherwise. In a well-conceived performance such as this, hard-driven at times but with undeniable drama, losses were surprisingly few. There was, moreover, unquestionable advantage in the Abbado-like sense of an orchestra of soloists coming together. Contrasts, as in the first movement introduction, were in some ways greater; nothing was prettified; and there was no doubting the symphonic integrity of the whole, whether as work or performance, a welcome change from an incoherent Mahler Sixth two nights earlier. Manacorda’s single-minded determination made for a concise, not un-Beethovenian experience, the first movement seemingly over almost before it had begun. In the slow movement, that solo and others were magically taken: as if heard for the first time, nothing taken for granted. (An extended cadenza for mobile telephone was less welcome.) Songful, soulful, yet never sentimental, the music spoke more of Bohemian words than an imagined ‘America’, and was all the better for it. Bubbly and boisterous, the scherzo teemed with life and not a little fury. I was less sure about the solo-string transition to the trio, though whether it was a strangeness too far is more a matter of taste than anything else. It had me listen, though. The finale sometimes had me miss a greater complement of strings, but the better course of action was to value what one did hear here, vehement, direct, and gripping. There was heart-rending exhilaration to the second group too, born of the material rather than imposed upon it. The struggle, once more, was unquestionably symphonic.

Musikfest Berlin (2): Stefanovich/MCO/Benjamin - Knussen, Purcell, Stravinsky, and Benjamin, 2 September 2021

Philharmonie

Knussen: The Way to Castle Yonder, op.21a
Purcell, arr. Benjamin: Three Consorts (German premiere)
Stravinsky: Movements
Benjamin: Concerto for Orchestra (German premiere)
Stravinsky: Pulcinella Suite

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

George Benjamin (conductor)

Images: Astrid Ackermann

In this concert George Benjamin, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and Tamara Stefanovich paid tribute to a number of influences on and/or connections with Benjamin’s music, as well as presenting two new works, which had had their first performances a few days earlier at the Proms. Oliver Knussen, featured both as himself, in The Way to Castle Yonder—as well as in Stefanovich’s solo encore—and as dedicatee of Benjamin’s Concerto for Orchestra would surely have approved of the programming, which also took in Purcell and Stravinsky. I imagine Pierre Boulez, Benjamin’s friend, mentor, and fellow Messiaen pupil, would have done too.

Knussen’s ‘pot-pourri’ from his opera Higglety Pigglety Pop! made for a delightful curtain-raiser, akin to the traditional overture. Exquisite craft was revealed in a performance both detailed and atmospheric, atmosphere revealed to be very much a creature of detail. I seem to recall Benjamin, Knussen’s efforts notwithstanding, to have admitted a lack of affinity with Schoenberg’s twelve-note music. (I may be imagining that; please forgive if so.) Whatever the truth of that, Schoenberg’s serial shadow fell generatively here, as, at least I felt, did the colouristic influence of his op.16 Five Orchestral Pieces. Ravel and Mussorgsky—the bells—seemed present too. The music, in any case, spoke of enchanting danger and, perhaps, parallel dangerous enchantment. A world played and danced before us, before closing in mystery, albeit a different mystery from that with which the piece had begun.

 

Three Consorts transcribes, as you might expect, three of Purcell’s viol consorts for chamber orchestra. In the first, the Six-Part In Nomine in G minor, strings, gravely beautiful, were gradually joined by other instruments: first a pair of trombones, next a pair of trumpets, then other woodwind and bells (tubular and Korean temple). Restrained and respectful in the best sense, the transcription not only permitted Purcell’s music to unfold as if by itself, but played a crucial part in the set of three considered as a whole. The second, the seventh of Purcell’s Fantazias (previously transcribed by Benjamin for chamber ensemble, unless I am mistaken), earlier scoring sounded as if it had been turned inside out, almost as if we now heard the skeleton on the outside and flesh within. A more overtly modernist glassy sound, when heard, seemed to evoke the world of Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin, or rather take angelic inspiration from there. (The MCO, it may be noted, gave the premiere of that opera.) Other refractions surprised and even reassured. I am not quite sure how Benjamin or the players had a pair of horns sound so Purcellian, yet they did, uncannily so. The third and final movement, the Fantazia Upon One Note, relished and communicated Purcell’s conceit. It was the most ‘colourful’ in the usual orchestral sense of the three too: good-natured, almost (I thought, bizarrely) Christmassy. But that was only the beginning. Things were not quite as they seemed. Bowed percussion and a darker, graver interlude were never quite dispelled by the return to Technicolor. Wonderful!

 

Angular play with Webern, in particular, was the name of the game—and game it is—in Movements. Process and play were felt almost as if we were hearing a successor work to the second book of Boulez’s Structures, which in a way we are. (It is surely no coincidence that Tamara Stefanovich has performed that music so memorably with Pierre-Laurent Aimard.) Timbre, needless to say, continued to be a preoccupation. Whatever the apparent similarities with Webern, Boulez, or Schoenberg, this could only ever be Stravinsky; a single flute note could—and did—tell us that, as did the particular gravity of a trio of trombones and that ever-strange use of violins. Piano phrasing was in every sense vital, ensuring that serial chess moves—however odd this may sound—sang. So too was a sense of chamber music engagement between soloist and other musicians, in which both Stefanovich and the MCO excelled. What expression there is here in a single gesture. The relation of the five movements to each other was a crucial part of the jigsaw too: there was straightforward rightness to how they fit together. And pitch repetition proved fathomlessly expressive toward the end, connecting intriguingly with Purcell.

 

As a generous encore, Stefanovich gave us Knussen’s Prayer Bell Sketch, op.29. If its opening gesture seemed to emerge from what we had just heard, the music went in a very different direction thereafter: more sustained, even Debussyan, not only in attack and reverberation, but also in spacing and even harmony. This was both a gentler and more sensual, yet constantly surprising journey.

 

Woodwind, soon joined by strings, announced Benjamin’s Concerto for Orchestra. The darkness of this opening had me almost tempted to think this a ‘Covid work’, though the dates of composition, 2019-21, suggest an earlier conception. Perhaps Bartók’s work of the same name offered something of a precedent in that regard, though the path it takes is quite different. Benjamin honoured precedent in permitting members of the orchestra, both as soloists and in (Bartókian) pairs, their moments in the limelight, but that felt entirely natural, never merely for the sake of the genre. Were there shards of Knussen too? Was that even a figure from, or at least with kinship to Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks? Almost certainly not, but there were perhaps connections with Stravinsky worth exploring on another occasion. More to the point than any alleged influence, viral or musical, this was a work extending the emotional soundworld of Benjamin’s third opera, Lessons in Love and Violence. A good deal of anguished tutti writing, by the standards both of composer and genre, led to a closing sense of magical stitching that perhaps did pay tribute to Knussen after all. Whatever the case of that may be, Benjamin ensured a fully satisfying sense of wholeness was cast in retrospect on the work even on a first hearing.

 

Benjamin’s performance of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite was puzzling: at first quite disconcerting, and not only because it took ears some time to adjust, but ultimately provocative and even revealing. The first two movements seemed to lack bite but that appeared to be strategy rather than failure, especially in the ‘Serenata’ where Stravinsky’s extraordinary orchestration (perhaps in the light of Benjamin’s reworking of Purcell) sounded stranger than ever. It was not so much a matter of Benjamin remoulding Stravinsky in his own image as offering a composer’s insight as conductor such as one rarely hears. (Again, both Knussen and Boulez sprang to mind.) Likewise the ‘Scherzino’ seemed reheard through late Stravinsky, perhaps Knussen too. For there was certainly rhythmic bite where Benjamin decided there should be, aggressively so in the ‘Tarantella’, almost to the exclusion of anything else. The second half of the suite seemed to react necessarily as well as charmingly to that high watermark. Again, the sheer strangeness of Stravinsky’s—and the orchestra’s—colours confounded in the ‘Gavotta con due variazioni’. Flute (Chiara Tonelli) and bassoons (Guilhaume Santana and Pierre Gomes) were very much cases in point in the second variation. Benjamin’s ear for timbre communicated a vision for the first part of the final movement darker and, I think, slower than I can recall hearing before. That made final release all the more joyous and necessary.

Salzburg Mozartwoche (5): MCO/Uchida - Mozart, 27 January 2020

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Piano Concerto no.17 in G major, KV 453

Flute Quartet no.1 in D major, KV 285

Piano Concerto no.22 in E-flat major, KV 482

Chiara Tonelli (flute)

Alexi Kenney (violin)

Béatrice Muthelet (viola)

Frank-Michael Guthmann (cello)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Mitsuko Uchida (piano, conductor)

Now for the third of three orchestras during my Salzburg visit. Following the Vienna Philharmonic and Camerata Salzburg, it was now time for the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, directed from the keyboard by Mitsuko Uchida. Each of these ensembles offered differences in approach, though too much need not be made of that; there was certainly nothing perverse, nor unwelcome. Perhaps there was a little more in the way of ‘period’ sound to aspects of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s performance: only really, though, in certain aspects of articulation. Immediacy was unquestionable, notes veritably flying from string bows. It was, moreover, instructive to hear Mozart’s gorgeous woodwind writing in the context of earlier chamber concerts in the series. For this was to be no more a display of puritanism than of any other form of egotism. All orchestras, all performances more broadly Cultivated, transparent, and in many ways more big-boned – in part, yet only in part, the Mozarteum acoustic – than what we had heard in earlier concerts, the G major Piano Concerto’s opening tutti met, perhaps, with a surprisingly soloistic response from Uchida: more overtly articulated than, say, Daniel Barenboim with the VPO, but also standing at times in greater opposition to the orchestra. Harmonic surprises registered with dramatic immediacy, not least the crucial intrusion of the flattened submediant, E-flat, in the run-up to the cadenza.

Warm and dark, a tragic edge to the MCO’s strings in the central Andante proved just as important as the Elysian delights savoured from its woodwind soloists. Did Uchida’s limpid piano entry signal reconciliation? Perhaps. If so, not yet, however, for there was some way to go in so vividly conceived an instrumental drama. Indeed, the sense of grief increased, not only in the minor mode, rendering consolation, when it came, all the more necessary and moving. In that, the cadenza proved a fine microcosm of the whole. It can be tempting to take the finale too fast. (A brief glance at later note values should be enough, yet alas is not always.) There was no question here, however, in a reading alert to this music’s very particular trajectory. Papageno must be reached, as opposed to nonchalantly presuming his company from the outset. The piano sparkled, never garbled; one heard its notes, no mere effects. Likewise, of course, the orchestra, whether in delectable oboe solos or repeated, generative violin figuration. Mozart’s minor-mode chromaticism reminded us once again – as had Uchida’s earlier balance between horizontal and vertical – of the music’s Schoenbergian tendencies, necessary preparation for an exhilarating final section, E-flat once again the propulsive grit in the finest of oysters.

There followed a charming performance, from MCO principals, of the First Flute Quartet: elegant and airy, with no attempt to make the music into something that it is not. The invention of the first-movement development section was a joy to hear – and, so it seemed, also to play. Structure became dynamic form, especially so at the moment of return, highlighting how all had been transformed by what had already passed. There was no underlining, though, nor any need for it. A central dance of blessed spirits led to some rebellious moments and thereby straight into the finale. Imbued with a proper sense of joy and release, if it sounded at times close to Haydn, that is only because it should.

I had a few doubts concerning the performance of KV 482, though could not help but applaud Uchida’s unwillingness to be swayed by fashion. Grander, statelier than one might generally hear, its first movement certainly afforded space to listen. What I missed, however, was the formal dynamism that a musician such as Barenboim brings to this music, its structure never quite taking flight in that – or another – way. There was nevertheless something splendidly distinctive to the grandeur of orchestral sweep and indeed to the dark-hued Romanticism of parts of the cadenza (Uchida’s own), indicative of the contrasts to be heard elsewhere. Likewise the deliberate tempo adopted for the slow movement, in combination with withdrawn string vibrato indicative, perhaps, of Orpheus taming the Furies. Who was Orpheus, though? Piano or wind? The latter were a little jaunty at times, jarring for me with the overall conception. That said, the pathos of the movement’s closing bars proved quite irresistible. Such doubts were dispelled, however, in a finale presented with that elusive yet unquestionable sense of Mozartian ‘rightness’, save perhaps for some of Uchida’s ornamentation during the Andantino cantabile episode. Its high spirits brooked no compromise between weight and energy. For an encore, an ineffably lovely, strikingly personal account of the slow movement from the C major Piano Sonata, KV 330/300h could not have been more welcome.

Dohr/MCO/Roth - Haydn, Martinů, and Ligeti, 15 December 2019

Kammermusiksaal, Berlin

Haydn: Symphony no.22 in E-flat major, ‘The Philosopher’

Martinů: Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano, and timpani

Ligeti: Hamburg Concerto, for horn and chamber orchestra

Haydn: Symphony no.103 in E-flat major, ‘Drum-Roll’

Holger Groschopp (piano)

Stefan Dohr (horn)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

If anything can offer light in dark, dark times, it is music: not only music, but music such as this, performed such as this. Goodness knows if, let alone when, an Englishman such as I will be able to live in Berlin again once this stay comes to an end. As things stand, it feels that the lamps are going out all over the world, if less in this part of continental Europe than elsewhere. Shall we see them lit again in our lifetime? Who knows? Amidst such gloomy, frankly despairing thoughts, this concert from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and François-Xavier Roth proved just the tonic, even if it rendered all the more glaring the gulf between the cosmopolitan civilisation of Haydn and the way so much of the world has turned.

What could be more singular than Haydn’s Symphony no.22? Has any other symphony in recorded history had the scoring of strings, two French horns, and two cor anglais (if one prefers, English horns)? That particular singularity one noticed—how could one not?—from the outset, perhaps enhanced, even amplified by having violins, violas, and wind standing. But the processional quality to the ‘Adagio’ first movement, here as well-judged and vivid as the pilgrims’ march in Harold en Italie, is ultimately the more unusual, the more fascinating; and so it was here. Horns, French and English, engaged in dialogue as if this were versicle and response. Suspensions told, ‘naturally’, quite without exaggeration. Above all, the music developed, meaningfully and movingly: so long as one listened. The second movement, marked ‘Presto’, burst forth in bright, vigorous necessity: hungry in the best way, nourishing too. Above all—and how sorely this was needed for this listener at this time—it made me smile: not in the condescending ‘Papa Haydn’ way most of us have now consigned to the rubbish bin, but inspired by the invention and humanity not only of Haydn but of these wonderful, international musicians. ‘Revelatory’ is a word overused, but I cannot resist it to describe the MCO and Roth in the minuet: taken one-to-a-bar and it felt just right. The balance between courtly and something more rustic, yet still cultivated, once again felt spot on. Slight relaxation for the trio seemed inherent rather than imposed. Then came the finale, ‘Presto’ as only Haydn can be. Roth took it fast, yes, yet never harried the music. Natural horns crackled; cor anglais echoed; strings provided the ultimate engine of development as rigorous as it was joyful. Truly this was music-making to lift the spirits.

Bohuslav Martinů’s Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano, and timpani—not ‘strong orchestras’, as my original typo had it, though on reflection...—comes from similarly dark times to ours, composed in Switzerland in 1938, the final page of the manuscript completed on the day the Munich Agreement was signed. It is difficult not to read the turbulence and tragedy of world events into the music; yesterday, for me at least, it proved impossible, although by the same token, it reminded me that such human flourishing should never be reduced to external influence and ultimately can never and will never be crushed. The first movement sounded urgent, incisive, troubled, controlled, its counterpart in Stravinsky’s subsequent Symphony in Three Movements very much Martinů’s offspring. Procedures and sounds evoked Bartók too: another salutary reminder of opposition to fascism. Anger was retained and transmuted in the second movement, accompanied now by the deepest of grief, whether voiced by piano (Holger Groschopp), strings, or both. How that grief told in present circumstances! The finale renewed the virtues of the opening movement, taking the forward in a jagged, mordant dance of death, culminating in grim apotheosis. Tragedy, then, in every sense of the word.  

And yet, onward we must go, however bleak and dark our prospects may seem. What better way to make that attempt than with the twin inventions of Ligeti and Haydn? Stefan Dohr joined an ensemble of outstanding MCO players, four natural horns (José Cicente Castelló, Jonathan Wegloop, José Miguel Asensi Marti, and Lionel Pointet) among them, for Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto, outstandingly led as ever by Roth. As Haydn laid before us an almost Newtonian tonal universe—not for nothing do many consider The Creation his supreme masterpiece of masterpieces—so Ligeti went beyond, to genuinely new discoveries, explaining: ‘In this piece I experimented with very unusual non-harmonic sound spectra. … By providing each horn or group of horns with different fundamentals I was able to construct novel sound spectra from the resulting overtones. These harmonies, which had never been used before, sound “weird” in relation to harmonic spectra. I developed both “weird” consonant and dissonant harmonies, with complex beats.’ The controlled mystery of the opening ‘Praeludium’—perhaps in its way a late-twentieth-century ‘Representation of Chaos’—seemed to tell us so much of what the work would be about. Moreover every note, ‘weird’ or not, told, as it might have done in Haydn, Webern, so many others from the great tradition with which Ligeti had far from entirely broken. The second of seven short movements, ‘Signale, Tanz, Choral,’ suggested an almost Benjaminian sense of play, first between horns, then between other instruments, not least the basset horns specifically chosen by the composer for enrichment and blend of sounds. A truly mesmerising solo duet from Dohr announced the three inner movements: ‘Aria, Askak, Hoketus’, ‘Solo, Intermezzo, Mixtur, Kanon’, and ‘Spectra’. An ensemble of untold yet controlled giddiness led us by the hand toward that fifth movement of near-Messiaensque sublimity. The closing ‘Capriccio’ and ‘Hymnus’ lived up fully to their names and yet equally expanded our understanding of them and their possibilities. For an encore, Dohr treated us to some of the finest playing and musicianship I have ever heard on any instrument, in a riveting Messiaen ‘Appel interstellaire’ from Des Canyons aux étoiles.

And so, we returned to Haydn and to E-flat major for the Drum-Roll Symphony, his penultimate, written more than thirty years later than the first symphony we had heard. Just as Ligeti’s work had, in context, picked up the importance of horns from Haydn, now Haydn picked up from Martinů aspecial role for timpani. Matthias Kelemen, beguilingly inventive without a hint of narcissism for his Intrada, was responded to in kind by cellos and others: a not dissimilar relationship of versicle and response from The Philosopher. Indeed, the first-movement introduction as a whole proved uncommonly dramatic, finding form in that drama as much as drama in that form. The exposition likewise presented Haydn both as single-minded and multi-voiced, an example for us all. Contrapuntal density and similar direction characterised a development section as full of surprises as the moment of return—whether one ‘knew’ or not. In the second movement—no sense whatsoever here of this being a slow movement—Roth’s swift tempo and lightness of texture did not in any sense preclude depth or exultancy. It was full of colour and delight, even—especially?—for someone such as me, who hears it so differently in his head. Matthew Truscott’s violin solo delighted equally; so too did a purpose that we only call Beethovenian because, quite frankly, it is, however much avant la lettre. I learned much from this and can say no better than that. The minuet witnessed a properly generative balance between the straightforward and sophisticated, echoed yet far from banally repeated in its trio. The controlled—that word again—helter-skelter of the finale offered kinship to Ligeti and a glint in the aural eye far from dissimilar, for both were surely the most European of composers. Haydn’s joy brought tears to my ears for a number of reasons. Catharsis, then, in humanism.

Musikfest Berlin (1) – Isabelle Faust and friends; MCO/Benjamin: Schoenberg and Benjamin, 12 September 2018

Kammermusiksaal

Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, op.4

Benjamin: Into the Little Hill

Isabelle Faust, Anne Katharina Schreiber (violins)

Antoine Tamesit, Danusha Waskiewicz (violas)

Christian Poltéra, Jean-Guihen Queyras (cellos)

Susanna Andersson (soprano)

Krisztina Szabó (mezzo-soprano)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

George Benjamin (conductor)

Image: © Adam Janisch 

Schoenberg and Benjamin offered a fine welcome back from Berlin and its September Musikfest to a prodigal son – especially so since, only the previous day, I had both received the first proofs for my Schoenberg biography and heard an excellent paper from George Haggett on Benjamin’s Written on Skin at OBERTO’s annual conference. Truth be told, there was for me little in the way of obvious connection between the two works on offer, save for the question of narration, brought very much to the fore in Martin Crimp’s libretto for Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, yet also surely apparent in Verklärte Nacht. Who is telling this story – and on what authority? Two very different genres, composers, ensembles, musical styles and languages nevertheless elicited two memorable performances, Into the Little Hill outstandingly so.

Schoenberg’s tone poem for string sextet – we should never forget that radicalism in itself, already seeking to reconcile and to renew Wagner and Brahms – opened, if not quite on the verge of audibility, then soft, mysterious enough to make us listen: pointing ahead to Webern, even to Nono. Christian Poltéra’s solo cello, soon joined by other ‘lower’ strings – can they really be lower when they make up four out of six? – proved febrile, indicative of human fragility, although certainly never fragile in a performative sense. Violins, especially Isabelle Faust, sometimes seemed more overtly keen to evoke elements of what may – or may not – be ‘period’ practice. Portamento was, at least initially, more in evidence from them, vibrato somewhat sparing. Led by Jean-Guihen Queyras and Antoine Tamesit, nocturnal blossoming thereby provoked proved a rare, even breathtaking treat. Not that any one of these musicians was ‘leading’ the music-making for more than a few bars: this is chamber music and so it sounded.

The violence of Benjamin’s opera was certainly prefigured at times in musico-narrative gestures in the Schoenberg’s performance, pizzicato anything but soothing. Narrative, moreover, was unquestionably to the fore, questioning whatever distinctions we might make between ‘musical’ and ‘poetic’ concerns. Twists and turns in individual lines aurally suggested those of a Jugendstil drawing, leaves, branches, lightness, and darkness of the forest, both material and metaphysical, emerging and transforming before our ears. Bar a patch of decidedly wayward intonation from Faust, the lack of smoothness was decidedly to be welcomed, each line seemingly re-thought, even re-composed according to the needs of the moment. The moment of change, of transformation was undeniable with Queyras’s cello solo. I felt a sense of transfiguration less: perhaps that was the point. In its particular materialism, not least in the vibrato-less moonlit silver of the close, this performance seemed to declare affinity with and distance from the orchestral tone poems of Strauss.

Schoenberg’s supposed antipode, Stravinsky was present, or so it sounded, in the opening of Into the Little Hill. Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Friends one might almost have called it. Moreover, soon it became clear that voices, even voices with words, might act instrumentally – take Krisztina Szabó’s use of consonants in ‘The Minister and the Crowd’ – as well as vice versa. All along, one heard both in work and performance a chiselled precision from Benjamin – who also conducted – that might, I suppose, be likened to Stravinsky (or Ravel, or many other composers), but which is without question the composer’s own. The precise choice of note, duration, timbre speaks for itself, whatever it might ‘mean’. An almost unbearably suspenseful scene between The Minister and The Stranger, the latter’s evil seduction both verbal (Susanna Andersson) and instrumental, made as powerful a dramatic, political point as if it had been staged.

The quiet tension of silence proved just as telling at that pivotal scene’s close, the shifty politician having sworn on his sleeping child: ‘unlike your god/unlike your word/unlike your smile/-[he] is innocent’. It was, though, the quiet tension of music, of musical processes, generated and generative, in the ensuing Interlude: it did what needed – what someone alleged was needed – to be done. ‘Why must the rats die, Mummy?’ The will of the people, in reality the satisfaction of the mob, would now be put into effect.

And so, in Part Two, the Minister re-elected, we could look or rather hear inside his head. There was an excellent, truly dramatic sense of a second ‘act’, of time having passed: Stravinskian sonorities once again reborn, fatally so. ‘And music?’ asked the Stranger upon his return. ‘All music – smiles the minister – is incidental.’ Is it really? The darkness of the eighth scene for ‘Mother(s) and Child(ren)’ was all too real, ghosts – burrowing children inside the Little Hill – in Benjamin’s machine likewise. ‘The deeper we burrow the brighter his music burns. Can’t you see? Can’t you see? Can’t you see?’

MCO/Uchida - Mozart and Bartók, 29 November 2016

Royal Festival Hall

Mozart – Piano Concerto no.17 in G major, KV 453

Bartók – Divertimento
Mozart – Piano Concerto no.25 in C major, KV 503

Mitsuko Uchida (piano/director)
Mahler Chamber Orchestra

‘Yes, of course I’m here,’ I tweeted a few minutes before the concert, with a picture of the programme and performers. Two Mozart piano concertos from Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with the Bartók Divertimento in between: give or take a piece by Schoenberg, I could hardly have asked for more. Perhaps, then, my expectations were unrealistic, for I found myself a little disappointed by the performance of the G major Piano Concerto, especially its first movement. I was impressed that Uchida had rethought, sometimes quite radically, the approach I recall from her celebrated recording with Jeffrey Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra. However, I was not entirely convinced. It was partly a matter of coming to terms with the Festival Hall acoustic, I think, in so intimate a performance, but it was not only that. Nevertheless, intrigued and slightly nonplussed is surely better than bored by the ‘same old’.

 

The orchestra opened crisply, stylishly, but sounded a little undernourished in the opening tutti. Uchida was, I think, faster, certainly more impish, than in her ECO recording. There is nothing wrong with that, but her non legato passages struck me as odd: I could not work out why they were being played as they were, although she certainly had me listen – and puzzle. Phrasing remained beyond reproach, though, and the chamber quality to the performance as a whole had its advantages. Indeed, the concerto sounded very much the companion piece to the Piano Quintet, KV 452, with which, if I remember correctly, was the coupling for that concerto recording. Only occasionally was a fuller orchestral sound unleashed, but Uchida was – interestingly – considerably more muscular in her approach to the recapitulation. The cadenza offered an amalgam of the different tendencies we had heard, for better and for worse. I liked the lessening of string vibrato at the opening of the slow movement, as if launching an operatic accompagnato – which, in a sense, it is. Various wind soloists and ultimately the piano soloist responded with greater warmth; however, I was nevertheless quite taken aback – positively – by the frankly Romantic minor-mode playing, whether overtly passionate, or more innig. This and the finale were, for me, far more involving. They both seemed to benefit also from a more settled, more juste, tempo. (Both are often taken too fast.) The finale’s particular character, Papageno chafing at the bit, was conveyed with that crucial sense of effortlessness. Classical variation form, too often the butt of ill-considered denigration, was vindicated in the best way possible. Piano and flute sforzandi seemed to hint at Beethoven; again, I do not remember hearing the passages in question played like that before.

 

Uchida withdrew for the Bartók, played standing (save for the cellos), directed from the leader’s desk by Matthew Truscott – and very well too. The first movement announced a variegated, energetic (in the best sense) approach, yielding nicely at times, in almost Viennese style. There was again a happy sense of chamber scale, without in this case ever sounding remotely underpowered. The slow movement opened inwardly, mysteriously, not quite glacial, but not quite the contrary either. Its contours were well traced, with a keen sense of drama on offer throughout. There were many gradations of relative thawing and outright contrast to be enjoyed. Idiomatic, never clichéd, the ‘Hungarian’ qualities to the performance of the finale sang out, yet never dominated unduly. The relationship between solo and ripieno playing was very much at the heart of the MCO’s music-making. Bachian contrapuntal lessons had been well learned, so as to emerge as agents of liberation – just as they always should be. There was menace too, and more than a hint of bitter irony.

 

Amongst smaller-scale recordings of what I have long thought of as Mozart’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto, I have long admired that from Alfred Brendel, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and the late Neville Marriner. Again, I was taken by surprise quite how different Uchida’s performance here was: more rhetorical, although always directed towards its tonal goal. Trumpets and drums seemed to have emboldened the MCO strings too. Oscillation between tonic major and minor was rightly at the heart of the performance; Charles Rosen would surely have approved. The measured tempo was well chosen, providing plenty of space for the musical argument to unfold, and to be dramatised. There was not perhaps quite the dramatic conception of a Daniel Barenboim here, but there is more than one way to play a Mozart concerto; Uchida’s ‘incidental’ flights of fancy were not to be slighted, and here seemed better integrated. The cadenza offered hints of Beethoven, all to the good in this ‘imperial’ work. Uchida’s slow movement offered ‘chamber’ contrast. Mozart was cherished, heartrendingly so, but never suffocated, in this garden of late, yet not too late, delights. An unexaggerated dialectic between fragility and ebullience characterised the finale. What could be more Mozartian? Uchida again proved perhaps surprisingly mercurial, rhetorical too. Whatever my doubts about the first concerto, this was a delight to the last.

 

George Benjamin Day: chamber works and Written on Skin, MCO/Benjamin, 19 March 2016

LSO St Luke’s and Barbican Hall

Purcell, arr. Benjamin – Fantasia 7 (1995)

Benjamin – Flight (1978-9)
Viola, Viola (1997)
Shadowlines (2001)
Bach, arr. Benjamin – Canon and Fugue from ‘The Art of Fugue’ (2007)

Members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra
George King (piano)
George Benjamin (conductor)

Written on Skin (2009-12)

The Protector – Christopher Purves

Agnès – Barbara Hannigan
Angel 1/The Boy – Tim Mead
Angel 2/Marie – Victoria Simmonds
Angel 3/John – Robert Murray

Benjamin Davis (director of semi-staged performance)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra 

George Benjamin (conductor)

George Benjamin’s Written on Skin could hardly have had superior reception. Wherever it has gone, it has triumphed. Bizarrely, an American opera house intendant, smarting at the acclaim accorded an opera that did not offer his favoured brand of neo-tonal pandering (Jennifer Higdon?!), lamented that Benjamin’s brilliant score was not something one would ‘sit down and play [a recording of] … at dinner’. All I can say to that is that Mr Gockley must host strange dinner parties – ‘honoured guests, meet your hostess, the lovely Lulu’ – and his preferred way of experiencing opera, eccentric for anyone, would seem in itself to disqualify him from running an opera house.  That, however, was not remotely consonant with the success witnessed on either side of the Atlantic, indeed on either side of the Channel.

 

I was a little suspicious first time around. Are not masterpieces supposed to fail before an initially uncomprehending public, incite a riot, or at least receive an insufficient performance? No, of course not, although such mythologies can be fun, not least in enabling us to feel superior to our predecessors. Surely, though, there must have been something wrong when critical and audience unanimity is so striking. (Yes, there will always be the odd exception, but who cares?) Nevertheless, when I saw the work at the end of its Covent Garden run, I had no option but to join the adoring throng. Happily, this Mahler Chamber Orchestra performance, again under the baton of the composer, confirmed me in my judgement that Written on Skin is an unalloyed masterpiece, although in some ways I find its predecessor, Into the Little Hill, the more provocative work and certainly a masterpiece too. I see no point in simply repeating a description of what has already become a repertory work; what I wrote in 2013 may, however be read here for those unfamiliar or in need of a reminder. (I was surprised, myself, about how much I had forgotten!) However, I shall make some remarks about what struck me on this particular occasion, and of course upon the performances themselves.

 

It seems almost obligatory for a serious new opera to reflect in some way upon the nature of opera; or is it that it is almost obligatory for a serious opera audience to do so? You see, the questions begin already. (Or is it that I am unhealthily obsessed with the operas of Richard Strauss…?) Here, at any rate, what struck me, perhaps still more so in what was close to a concert performance – not meant as disrespect to Benjamin Davis’s able direction – was how much the opera’s status is entwined with that of the Boy’s book, ‘written on skin’. That illuminates – in more than one sense – our experience of the work’s progress as drama and the complexity, somehow nevertheless simple, of the relationship between mediæval setting and contemporary reception. Martin Crimp’s libretto, of course, points the way in that respect, introducing anachronisms as well as well-nigh ritually identifying narration. Said the critic.

 

Had this been Birtwistle, say, there would surely have been a parallel, indeed questioning, ritual in the music. Despite the toing and froing of the Angels, I do not really hear that here. Benjamin’s way is different; I have no wish to ascribe ‘influence’ here; but in its length – perfect for but a few masterpieces by the likes of Monteverdi, Mozart, Wagner, and a very few others – and in the assuredness of its narrative, I was put more in mind of Berg and Janáček. The division into three parts is perhaps a minor indication of that. The astounding musical climaxes of each part are perhaps more akin to the great operas of Janáček, although Wozzeck is surely not so very far away in some intangible, maybe even tangible, sense. The score presents other points of reference, always refracted, and did, I think, in performance too. Benjamin wrote the opera with the particular sound of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in mind. Here it’s relatively small numbers, at least when it came to strings, were utterly belied by their sound, especially at those climaxes, but also in cushioning the voices and speaking, almost Wagner-like, as our Greek Chorus. Although famously a Messiaen pupil – sometimes one is tempted to ask: who was not? – it is not so often that I have heard Messiaen in Benjamin; here, in certain chords, even progressions, I fancied that I did (just, actually as I did in one of the works in the earlier concert, on which more below). Boulez, perhaps inevitably, came to mind too: again certain matters of kinship rather than influence, I think: the exquisite alchemy of melody, harmony, and timbre, for instance, with roots in earlier music surely renewing their musico-dramatic vows, poignantly reminding us that Boulez himself never wrote the opera he always planned, and which we always longed for. There is, I think, no parallel for the use to which Benjamin puts some of the most ear-catching instrumental solos: bass viol, glass harmonica, and so on. They may be used elsewhere, but there is nothing evidently Mozartian about, say, the latter. Nor need there be. This is confident writing in skin from a composer entirely bien dans sa peau.

There was nothing, needless to say, to beware of in Benjamin’s conducting of the score. His quiet authority seemed to speak almost unmediated, although that is of course ever an illusion of performance. Likewise, the playing of the MCO, reaching the end of a European tour with the conductor-composer, seemed almost beyond praise. Three of the original, Aix-en-Provence cast returned (Barbara Hannigan, Christopher Purves, and Victoria Simmonds). It might on some occasion be reassuring to find something adversely to criticise in a performance by Hannigan. Now was not, however, the occasion to do so. Her musico-dramatic portrayal of Agnès judged to perfection, almost as if emerging from the divided (at one point, Paul Griffiths’s note tells us, fifteen-part) MCO strings themselves, the character’s journey to selfhood, erotic fulfilment, and ultimately (necessary) tragedy. If it were Hannigan’s voice that ultimately continued to resonate once we had left the hall, the dangerous allure of Tim Mead’s counter-tenor came close. The complete identification of Purves with the role of Protector seemed, if anything, to bring still more dramatic daring than at Covent Garden. He could edge towards speech were he wished, without one ever suspecting that to be a musical failing. His eyes said it all; except his voice said more. Simmonds and Robert Murray brought subtlety and dramatic energy, as well as musical security, to their ‘lesser’ roles, still crucial – as, indeed, was every part of this outstanding performance.

Earlier in the day, a few minutes’ walk away at LSO St Luke’s, we had heard ‘Lunchtime with George’, a splendid survey of some of the composer’s chamber works from members of the MCO and, in the case of the piano piece, Shadowlines, George King. First was Benjamin’s arrangement of a Purcell Fantasia (Jaan Bossier (clarinet), Sonja Starke (violin), Maximilian Hornung (cello), Alphonse Cemin (celesta)). In one of his wonderfully engaging introductory conversations with Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Benjamin described Purcell’s early viol consort works as some of the greatest music ever written on this island. Indeed they are – and would that we heard them as often as their stature demands, or even a little more often. Already an old, verging upon archaic, genre when Purcell wrote them, they seem almost made to encourage such dialogue between past and present, and were indeed written, alongside arrangements by Oliver Knussen and Colin Matthews, as part of an Aldeburgh anniversary tribute to the English Orpheus. The second half in that concert was to be Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time; Benjamin switched Messiaen’s piano for celesta, imparting an unearthly feeling to the music which, in retrospect, might fancifully be heard as prefiguring that angelic glass harmonic in Written in Skin. Slow, steady progress of the first part and alternation with the quicker sections exchanged echt-Purcellian melancholy for something approaching high spirits, yet the suspicion of loss remained. Glassy, vibrato-less stringed instruments gained in vibrating allure, yet the journey was never one-way; this is thoughtful ‘authenticity’ rather than the fatwa of a period ayatollah. I thought at one point of Berio, although the sound and the sensibility are different. Music mediates, brings us together, perhaps especially when our way of listening – Pulcinella, anyone? – is called into question and enhanced.

Júlia Gállego was the solo flautist for one of Benjamin’s earliest-published pieces, Flight. Gállego worked with the composer seemingly as one, to convey, as well as melodic, Messiaenic profusion, a sense of harmonic ‘depth’, almost programmatically so, given the inspiration of ‘the sight of birds soaring and dipping over the peaks of the Swiss Alps’. Form was dynamically revealed; attack was endlessly varied. There was, ultimately, a splendid sense of numinous mystery: here, indeed, was a pupil of Messiaen.

 

Viola, Viola was written, at the invitation of Toru Takemitsu, for Yuri Bashmet and Nobuko Imai to perform at the 1997 opening of the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall. If it managed to fill that hall, then it would scarcely have problems at St Luke’s. Nor did it under the violists’ worthy successors, Anna Puig Torné and Béatrice Muthelet. Confounding expectations seemed to me a theme, intentional or otherwise, of work and performance. Not only is this, as it were, an orchestral work for but two instrumentalists, but everything seems unpredictable, whilst making perfect sense after it has happened. (I have doubtless read too much Hegel to be thinking of him here, but such is the way of his dialectic, or indeed of theories of evolution.) Moments of éclat – Boulez on my mind here! – registered powerfully, unexpected yet anything but arbitrary. Harmonics, sometimes in tandem, sometimes not, could be understood at least in this sense to perform a similar role. Implied harmonies were again conveyed in masterly fashion, both as work and performance. (Apologies for any sexism there, but ‘mistressly’ really does not work!) Moments of Bartók seemed to echo, now strident, now tinged once again with Purcellian melancholy. Sometimes, if I closed my eyes, I could have sworn there were more than two players, whether ‘ancient’ consort or ‘modern’ quartet. A Mussorgskian bell, but no pealing? Maybe it was that I had recently heard Boris. Stravinskian games: almost certainly.

 

King’s performance of Shadowlines sounded to me equally authoritative. Benjamin’s compositional games, whatever he might have wished, perhaps came even more to the fore in the work’s canonical progress. We heard its six sections as a continuous whole, to be sure, but also very much with their own character. The first piece, marked ‘Cantabile’, proved the gentle curtain-raiser of the composer’s own description. I thought of a Boulez Notation, at least some of its harmonies. The hand-crossing of the second movement, ‘Wild’ with almost berceuse-like rocking beneath was captured as well as I imagine the work’s dedicatee, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, having done. Duetting in the ‘Scherzando’ movement – Benjamin suggested duetting bassoons – eventually broadened into a veritable chorus, putting me in mind, despite the modern piano, of the timbral possibilities of some nineteenth-century instruments. It was the fifth of the six movements that occupied the greatest time, and here it received a volcanic, perhaps again post-Messieanic performance, climax superbly judged. In the end, paradoxically or maybe dialectically, the composer’s stated wish that, as in the first movement of Webern’s Symphony, we lose perception of the canon was fulfilled partly in the mediated infidelity of our experience. Vertical and horizontal elements would dissolve and find themselves reinstated; or so I imagined. The epilogue truly sounded as such; I thought of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales.

Finally, Benjamin’s arrangement of the Canon in Hypodiapason and Contrapunctus VII from the Art of Fugue (Paco Varoch (flute), Stefán Jón Bernhardsson, Manuel Moya (horns), Jagdisch Mistry, Timothy Summers, Michiel Commandeur (violins), Delphine Tissot, Joel Hunter (violas), Martin Leo Schmidt (cello)). It was composed at Boulez’s request for a concert in which his own music would alternate with arrangements of Bach. (What a wonderful idea!) Benjamin’s piece takes the unique (I do not know whether it is empirically, but please humour me!) instrumentation of Mémoriale. In this, the only work requiring a conductor, Benjamin took the Canon fast, yet it never seemed remotely hurried; rather, it sounded juste. Counterpoint was ‘revealed’ in every sense, again presaging the evening’s opera. The fugue offered a change of pace and, so it seemed, of perspective, in an almost Birtwistle-like sense. (Again, I think that was just my own fancy, but so be it.) The composer’s desire to suggest an organ here was mesmerisingly fulfilled: here a sixteen-foot bourdon, there the strange alchemy – that word again – of a horn and viola duet, a miracle of ‘registration’. It made me think that it would be a very good thing, were Benjamin to write for the King of Instruments itself. Fastidious expressivity came close to Boulez; Bachian reinvention suggested the music of the spheres. This was a concert so engrossing that it too might have been written on skin.

 

Prom 9 - MCO/Andsnes - Beethoven and Stravinsky, 23 July 2015

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.1 in C major, op.15

Stravinsky – Apollo

Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.4 in G major, op.58

Leif Ove Andsnes (piano, director)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra 

Copyright: BBC/Chris Christodoulou

 

With this concert, Leif Ove Andsnes and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra opened a three-concert survey of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos (plus the Choral Fantasy) and works by Stravinsky. The First Piano Concerto opened in highly promising fashion, the tutti offering variegated sound and an already-clear sense of goal-orientation. Andsnes’s tempo was probably fast ‘objectively’ but sounded ‘right’. This was a smallish orchestra, but there was no smallness of ambition. The turn to the minor mode gave a transformation of character, not just of tonality. I could have done without rasping ‘natural’ trumpets and hard kettledrum sticks, although what seems to be an increasingly popular post-modernist melange of instruments could by the same token have been worse. Upon the pianist’s entry, we heard clear kinship with the early piano sonatas. Transitional passages brought commendable flexibility; indeed, throughout, it was the liminal passages, rightly, which most intrigued, harmonies both telling and questioning. Bubbly woodwind solos were, quite simply, a joy.

 

In the Largo, I missed a larger body of strings; the sublimity of a Beethoven slow movement seems to demand greater cushioning. Woodwind and piano, however, sounded as gorgeous as ever. Line was securely, meaningfully maintained throughout, in  movement we heard as if in one breath. For better and for worse, mostly but not entirely for better, this was definitely a post-Abbado performance of Beethoven. Now if only one could somehow combine the virtues of this with the best of Daniel Barenboim… The finale truly sounded as a finale, its post-Mozartian inheritance explored to great advantage. Yes, it was fast, but it breathed. Episodes, moreover, seemed to breathe yet more life into the movement, just as they should.

Stravinsky at his ‘whitest’ followed. I cannot quite follow the logic of the particular Beethoven and Stravinsky pairings, but no matter. Led from the violin by Matthew Truscott (his ever-stylish solos truly excellent), the MCO adopted an unusual seating-and-standing arrangement: cellos seated in a semi-circle, other strings standing around them. Apollo is not my least favourite Stravinsky work; I do not actively dislike it, as I do Orpheus. Yet, the work’s manifest virtues notwithstanding, I cannot dissent from Boulez’s observation about the neo-Classical Stravinsky (at least at his most extreme) having fallen into the intellectual quicksands of others. At any rate, this was a fine performance, with, at times, more than a hint of similarly ‘white’ balletic Prokofiev. (Now there is a ‘difficult’ relationship between composers.) There was a keen sense of narrative from the Prologue onwards, the return to the initial tempo in the ‘Birth of Apollo’ bringing transformation to the opening material in the light of what had passed in the Allegro section.

The Muses joined Apollo’s violin as if truly compelled. This was not a cold performance, far from it, but Stravinsky’s polemical froideur remaind, as did the ‘unreality’ of the almost bizarrely – and surely deliberately so – tonal music: Boulezian quicksand maybe, but interesting quicksand. The Muses’ variations were well characterised without excess. Polyrhymnia sounded vividly balletic; Terpsichore seemed almost to ‘split the difference’ between her two sisters. Apollo’s Variation benefited from splendidly rich string sound – more of that in Beethoven too, please! – with the god’s emphatic alterity there for all to hear. It was in the Apotheosis that we heard the strongest real echoes of the (French) Baroque, although difference was nevertheless maintained. I may ultimately find the Webernised Rameau of Agon (or is it vice versa?) more to my taste, but this still made its point. Beautifully sensitive playing proved just as variegated as had been the case in Beethoven.

It was to Beethoven we now returned, with perhaps the very greatest, and certainly the most lovable, of all his piano concertos: the Fourth. Andsnes’s opening phrase seemed to offer a piano ‘without hammers’. The orchestral response was subtle, full of life. I do not think this was a larger string section – I did not count the players – but it sounded fuller of tone. There was certainly a strong sense, again unexaggerated, of the Beethovenian sublime, and the MCO’s woodwind section proved as remarkable as ever. The piano’s second entry reminded us that this was, in every sense, a concerto, not a symphony. It may have been in many respects an intimate performance, but it did not feel scaled down. As for Andsnes’s trills, his passagework: they were truly to die for! The exultant moment of return was again subtle but no less powerful for that.

The strings in the Andante con moto seemed very much to have taken to heart the oft-repeated comparison to the Furies. But need they have been so brusque? Gluck’s Furies are not, or at least should not be. There was, however, an undoubtedly heightened contrast with the piano’s melting tone as Orpheus. Again, those trills! The finale seemed especially alert to its subdominant provenance and to the continuing tension between tonal centres. Others will again doubtless have been keener on the trumpets and hard sticks than I was. Rhythms were spruce. Above all, harmonic motion was understood and communicated, syncopations working their magic in tandem. And yes, once again, those trills! A couple of Bagatelles as encores (op.119 no.8 and op.33 no.7) had us longing for more.