McCawley/RPO/Davan Wetton - Mozart and Haydn, 12 April 2016

Cadogan Hall

Mozart – Le nozze di Figaro, KV 492: Overture

Mozart – Vesperæ solennes de confessore, KV 339: ‘Laudate dominum’
Mozart – Piano Concerto no.21 in C major, KV 467
Haydn – Missa in tempore belli, Hob.XXII/9

Leon McCawley (piano)

Grace Davidson (soprano)

Anna Harvey (mezzo-soprano)

Mark Wilde (tenor)

Ashley Riches (bass-baritone)

City of London Choir

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

Hilary Davan Wetton (conductor)

 

A wonderful concert, quite the tonic (if you will forgive the Classical pun, initially unintended). Hilary Davan Wetton and the RPO began with the Figaro Overture. ‘Authenticists’, although not the late Nikolaus Harnoncourt, would probably have described it as ‘sedate’, but it was not; there was life to it and real symphonic stature too (lack of a development section notwithstanding). Crisp, warm, with nothing exaggerated to the accents, nor to anything else, it sounded just right. There was some gorgeous horn-playing too.

My only complaint about the next item was that we did not get to hear the entire KV 339 Vespers. No matter: we heard a lovely account of the most celebrated ‘number’, ‘Laudate Dominum’. Grace Davidson offered a clean, honest, stylishly ornamented performance of the soprano part, her bell-like voice ideally suited. Warm playing and choral singing from the City of London Choir were equally appreciated.

Leon McCawley joined the orchestra for an excellent performance of the C major Piano Concerto, KV 467. Davan Wetton imparted a fine sense of the martial quasi-neo-Classicism (think La clemenza di Tito, but not quite) to the opening tutti. Sternness but also a willingness to yield were hallmarks of the performance as a whole. Lovely wind playing was answered by McCawley’s pearly tone, every note weighed for its colour, without a hint of pedantry. The music ‘flowed like oil’, as someone once said. Trills were an especial joy. The second group was, rightly, both related and contrasted to what had gone before, form assuming its own dynamism and balance. The piano writing looked forward at times to Beethoven, without ever sounding quite ‘like’ him. Nina Milkina’s cadenza here (and in the finale) offered a winning sense of fidelity through Romantic anachronism. The slow movement benefited from beautiful string playing, a perfect marriage of arco and pizzicato redolent of warm evening serenades. If that evoked Salzburg, McCawley’s piano evoked Vienna, and rightly so. Phrasing was inobtrusively ‘right’, a tribute to soloist, orchestra, and conductor alike. Above all, the music sang. The finale emerged as heir to both its predecessors, the RPO woodwind leading us into a veritable garden of delights. Chamber and orchestral tendencies were held in splendid balance throughout.

Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli received an equally fine performance. Its opening ‘Kyrie’ already seemed to speak both of the composer’s warm humanity and of his symphonic-developmental genius. Davidson’s soprano entry presented us with a change of tempo and mood, with all the virtues of her solo performance. Davan Wetton took the movement at quite a lick, yet without hurrying, let alone harrying, it. And how could one not fall in love, were one not already, with the composer of those responsorial (now soprano/alto to tenor/bass, now vice versa) eleisons? The ‘Gloria’ likewise had a proper sense of Haydn’s gloriously civilised eighteenth-century nature, with serious symphonic backbone lest one fall back on clichés of ‘Papa’. Davan Wetton’s choral experience was very clear – and welcome, as was the discipline of the singers themselves. The cello solo for the ‘Qui tollis’ section had its richness matched – sorry about another unintended pun – by that of the bass-baritone of Ashley Riches. Clarity and warmth were, again, shown to be anything but antithetical. There was a gloriously rich choral sound too on ‘suscipe’, followed by hushed by ‘deprecationem nostram’ premonitions of the Missa solemnis, also to be heard upon the imprecation ‘miserere nobis’. Highly convincingly, the ‘Quoniam’ section was taken at the tempo of a typical Haydn symphonic finale. Those ‘Amens’: again, how could one not adore them?

The opening of the ‘Credo’ was taken slower, the sturdiness of the Church as Rock of St Peter vividly communicated. Haydn’s neo-Baroque tendencies were here given their full due. The dark orchestral writing of the ‘Et incarnatus est’ section, not just its harmonies, but also its neo-Handelian writing for bassoon (I thought of the Witch of Endor), was splendidly conveyed. Mark Wilde’s Italianate manner and Anna Harvey’s richness of tone somehow both seemed to prepare the way for the firework-like ‘Et resurrexit’. The final fugue, quite rightly, returned to that opening sturdiness, again evoking Handel. Out of that, the ‘Amens’ sounded gorgeous: fruit that was almost Mozartian in its indecency.

 

Sweetness and vigour characterised the ‘Sanctus’, Wilde’s contribution finely balanced. The ‘Bendictus’ sounded both tragically imploring and imploringly tragic, prior to the balm of the major mode, properly post-Mozartian in its ambivalence. Musical values were never sacrificed to the merely ‘theatrical’ in the ‘Agnus Dei’, although the military music was played for everything it was worth. (Again, Haydn seemed to steal from the Beethovenian future.) Choral consolation was as real as it was lovable. We all need more Haydn in our lives; we all need more choral Haydn in our lives. Next stop: The Seasons on Sunday, from the LSO and Simon Rattle.

 

 

 

ECO/Vermunt - Handel and Adrian Thomas, 4 July 2013

St Paul’s Cathedral

Handel – Te Deum for the Peace of Utrecht, HWV 278

Adrian Thomas – The Idea of Peace (world premiere)
Handel – Jubilate for the Peace of Utrecht, HWV 279

Gillian Keith (soprano)

Lucy Hall (soprano)
Kamilla Dunstan (mezzo-soprano)
Emily Kyte (mezzo-soprano)
Mark Wilde (tenor)
Martin Hässler (baritone)

Choristers of Utrecht Cathedral Chior School

Toonkunstkoor Utrecht

Canon Michale Hampel (narrator)

English Chamber Orchestra

Jos Vermunt (conductor)

 

The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which established the Peace of Utrecht, concluded the long-running War of the Spanish Succession and signalled the final nail in the coffin for Louis XIV’s aspirations to universal monarchy. Accompanying commercial treaties – the Treaty itself actually a series of treaties – laid the way for economic expansion, so the ‘peace’ seems an especially appropriate settlement for the City of London Festival to be celebrating its tercentenary. Given the death toll, variously estimated at somewhere between 400,000 and 1.251 million, I could not also but help think of Voltaire’s Candide, in which the tradition of the military Te Deum joins the list of items for excoriation:

There was never anything so gallant, so spruce, so brilliant, and so well disposed as the two armies. Trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon made music such as Hell itself had never heard. The cannons first of all laid flat about six thousand men on each side; the muskets swept away from this best of worlds nine or ten thousand ruffians who infested its surface. The bayonet was also a sufficient reason for the death of several thousands. The whole might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery.

At length, while the two kings were causing Te Deum to be sung each in his own camp, Candide resolved to go and reason elsewhere on effects and causes. He passed over heaps of dead and dying, and first reached a neighbouring village; it was in cinders, it was an Abare village which the Bulgarians had burnt according to the laws of war. Here, old men covered with wounds, beheld their wives, hugging their children to their bloody breasts, massacred before their faces; there, their daughters, disembowelled and breathing their last after having satisfied the natural wants of Bulgarian heroes; while others, half burnt in the flames, begged to be despatched. The earth was strewed with brains, arms, and legs.

It is no coincidence that the eighteenth century was especially ripe with schemes for ‘perpetual peace’, from writers such as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant. Not that any of them had the slightest chance of being considered as anything but wild utopianism, as the European states system continued to dictate foreign policy. (We might bitterly recall New Labour’s claim to have been adopting something called an ‘ethical foreign policy’ whilst launching a series of murderous invasions.)

 

Returning to 1713, Handel, newly settled in London, in today’s unlovely parlance an ‘economic migrant’, wrote his Te Deum and Jubilate for the Chapel Royal, and had them formally premiered in St Paul’s Cathedral in July, as here, though a public dress rehearsal had actually taken place in March of that year. It took my ears a while to adjust to the notorious St Paul’s acoustic, the dome swallowing up so much of the sound, and the reverberation continuing longer than anywhere else I can think of. Jos Vermunt wisely did not push the music of the Jubilate; trying to do battle with the echo would only result in victory for the latter. There were even times when that echo helped, or at least added a notable additional quality to the performance, for instance in the halo surrounding the words ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. In this relatively early Handel, there are already borrowings from some of his Italian music, but also kinship conscious or otherwise, with French ceremonial music – Lully and Charpentier – also made its mark, albeit with a welcome lack of bombast. There is plangency too, here conveyed with skill both by the ECO, oboes especially, and the soloists. ‘When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man’ was taken wonderfully slowly, and successfully sustained, for which particular credit should go to mezzo-soprano, Kamilla Dunstan. The following a cappella quartet, ‘When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death’ seemed to look forward to the unaccompanied chorus, ‘Since by man came death,’ from the Messiah, benefiting from excellent balancing between the soloists; it likewise is followed by concerted rejoicing. Echt-Handelian trumpets made a fine appearance upon ‘O Lord, save thy people,’ though curiously accompanied by a lengthy ad lib from an audience noseblower; his command of rhythm was more commendable than his timing. All of the soloists acquitted themselves well. Having already mentioned Dunstan, I should also single out the baritone, Martin Hässler, who combined beauty of tone with verbal clarity and understanding; I hope to hear more of him.

 

Choral singing, somewhat hampered by the acoustic, seemed to gain a degree of focus in the premiere of Adrian Thomas’s The Idea of Peace, the Toonkunstkoor Utrecht now joined by choristers from Utrecht Cathedral Choir School. The City of Utrecht had commissioned the work, which here received its first performance. Alas, whilst performances, not least from the two soloists, Gillian Keith and Mark Wilde, seemed excellent, the work itself disappointed. Hampered by an over-enthusiastic gathering of texts from disparate sources by Arjen Eijenraam, Thomas had little success in transforming lines such as ‘People are infinitely precious/Take them as they are,’ or ‘Bring dialogue, benefit, and joy into the world’, into something idiomatically vocal. He was certainly fortunate, however, in having Keith to despatch words of Queen Anne, ‘We have this business of Peace so much at heart’, with pinpoint melismatic skill. (The accompanying chimes sounded an uncomfortably ‘New Age’ note, however.) Vague orientalism, for instance in a prominent cello solo, put me in mind of another occasional piece, from one Francis Grier, my first Cambridge college, Jesus, endured for its quincentenary; the sole comfort from this work’s protracted progress was that none of us would be likely to hear it ever again. If soft-centred, anodyne harmonies, allied to excessive reliance upon the harp and weirdly jaunty settings of words such as ‘Non Violence, Truthfulness, Tolerance/Respect and Partnership not only be/renewed though Kingdoms, States/Dominions and Provinces...,’ be your thing, then you might have looked more kindly upon it. Or, as a tedious refrain had it, ‘Listen, talk, and learn and flourish together,’ might have been a little more the order of the day; to my ears, it sounded more akin to the soundtrack for a primary school ‘learning activity’, run hopelessly out of control. How one longed, amongst this paradoxically glib worthiness, for a true message of the horrors of war: A Survivor from Warsaw perhaps, or Il canto sospeso.

 

What one longed for still more was the return of Handel, whose Jubilate therefore proved all the more welcome. Dunstan’s duetting with trumpet proved a delight, as indeed did all the expressive instrumental and vocal solos (Handel limits himself to three here). The darkly chromatic setting of ‘For the Lord is gracious, His mercy is everlasting,’ peered forward towards Mozart, who would surely have loved Handel’s setting, had he known it. A resplendent final doxology brought together the ECO and choir in harmony infinitely more convincing than that attempted during the previous piece, enthusiastically presented though it might have been. Handel nevertheless emerged unscathed, ready for another three hundred years.