The Royal Albert Hall, Cameron's Britain, and Franco's Spain

The Royal Albert Hall is one of London's most recognisable buildings, not least on account of its granting a home to the BBC Proms each summer. A monument to the Victorian age, though certainly not a model of good acoustics, its management now appears to have resolved to take Victorianism a little too far, indeed to go beyond a parody of Victorian industrial relations. Despite a majority vote (73% of the employees taking part) for union recognition, a vote which took place on terms agreed between management, the conciliation service, ACAS, and the union in question, BECTU, the RAH management has now reneged, refusing to recognise the union to enable collective bargaining. This truly appalling state of affairs coincides unhappily with new anti-trade union legislation from the government, parts of which David Davis MP, the Conservative MP for Howden and Haltemprice, has likened to something from Franco's Spain. The Royal Albert Hall needs to reconsider, lest its patrons consider, indeed more than consider, a boycott. Perhaps performers might think in such terms too?

(For more details on the dispute from BECTU, click here.)

Prom 57: Zimmermann/GMYO/Gatti - Wagner, Berg, Strauss, and Ravel, 26 August 2012

Royal Albert Hall

Wagner – Parsifal: Prelude to Act III and ‘Good Friday Music’

Berg – Violin Concerto
Strauss – Suite: Der Rosenkavalier (attrib. Artur Rodziński)
Ravel – La Valse

Frank-Peter Zimmermann (violin)

Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra

Daniele Gatti (conductor)

 

There is probably no finer Parsifal conductor alive than Daniele Gatti. It was once again a privilege to hear his shaping of music from Wagner’s final drama, even if I find it difficult to reconcile myself with the practice of performing ‘bleeding chunks’ as the ‘Good Friday Music’, and remain a little surprised at conductors with a deep understanding of Wagner’s works performing such snippets out of context in this way. (That is not, I hasten to add, a matter of ‘purism’, simply a feeling that the experience remains insufficient. There is nothing wrong, for instance, with performing the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger as a curtain-raiser. If it works, it works; but if it does not...) At any rate, there seemed something a little odd about starting with the opening to the third act. Nevertheless, the performance was of such dramatic intensity that one expected to hear Kundry groaning, and felt a little disoriented by a transition of sorts into the ‘Good Froday Music’. The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra’s woodwind solos were especially fine, reminiscent of the Siegfried-Idyll. Gatti’s varied pacing proved unerring, some though by no means all of it unerringly slow; the crucial thing was the unbroken communication of Wagner’s melos.

 

It was perhaps noteworthy that, as with all the music on this programme, Gatti conducted the Berg Violin Concerto from memory. Gatti has a distinguished track-record in the music of the Second Viennese School; there could certainly be no doubting either his or Frank-Peter Zimmermann’s knowledge of the score. The GMYO woodwind again played with great intensity throughout, though Zimmermann’s account began in somewhat subdued fashion. (Perhaps it was partly a matter of the Royal Albert Hall’s dreadful acoustic.) I wondered whether it were too subdued, despite the apt impression of the ‘angelic’ thereby imparted, but it came to life during the Allegretto section of the first part. Gatti’s understanding of Berg’s twelve-note writing was abundantly clear in his shaping of woodwind lines in particular, pointing the way to the Bach chorale that would be fully sounded in the second part. There was, moreover, a winning Viennese lilt, rubato and all, to be heard to the rhythms. The second part opened with a vehemence previously lacking; there could be no doubting Zimmermann’s virtuosity here either. Moments of Mahlerian stillness were just as striking, the vistas (Carinthian?) that opened up as striking as anything in the music of another composer with whom Gatti has long exhibited a particular affinity. Zimmermann’s working out of serial processes, and more generally Berg’s motivic development, was as impressive as Gatti’s. The Andante from Bach’s A minor Sonata, BWV 1003, made for an apt, wonderfully intimate, encore.

 

If I continue to harbour doubt about performing extracts from Parsifal, feelings about the Rodziński (allegedly his work) suite from Der Rosenkavalier go beyond any conceivable understanding of reasonable doubt. Yes, of course it is always a pleasure with a fine orchestra and conductor to hear this music, but it could surely have been better put together; indeed, one sometimes wonders whether it could have been worse put together. It was all wonderfully performed, making one long to hear Gatti and indeed the orchestra in the work as a whole. The opening horns resounded with such magnificence that I had to check first that we remained in the Royal Albert Hall, and second that there were only four of them. (We had remained there, and there were only four.) Masses strings could barely have sounded more Straussian in the Act I Prelude, but the melying away after Strauss’s initial flourishes was every bit as impressive. Gatti pointed up echoes of Elektra without overdoing them; this was less a determinedly modernistic Rosenkavalier selection than a Romantic performance with a sense of alternatives. Throughout tone and textures were subtly variegated, even when the allocation of vocal lines to instrumentalists, however splendidly played, proved a little difficult to take. I was left wondering how much, if any, sense the selection would have made to someone unacquainted with the opera as a whole, but that was not the fault of the performance.

 

For that reason alone, La Valse proved more satisfying. I was struck from the outset at the ‘French’ quality of the sound Gatti drew from the orchestra, not unlike that which one would expect from his own Orchestre National de France. Ravel’s score sounded as if a painterly, Cézanne-like, phantasmagoria. It seemed to be taken faster than usual, though not excessively so, and the tempo was certainly not unvaried. The vortex into which the Viennese waltz whirled itself had a mechanistic, Stravinskian quality: Ravel viewed through the prism of The Rite of Spring. There was something finer to come, however, and despite my reservations concerning ‘bleeding chunks’, a rapt account of the Prelude to Act III of Die Meistersinger, the orchestra’s strings offering a challenge to any permanent opera or symphony orchestra. Again, one longed to hear Gatti in the complete work.

Prom 13: WEDO/Barenboim (4) - Beethoven and Boulez, 24 July 2012

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Symphony no.8 in F major, op.93

Boulez – Anthèmes 2
Beethoven – Symphony no.7 in A major, op.92

Michael Barenboim (violin)
IRCAM live electronics
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

My friend Théo Bélaud (if you do not know his site, le petit concertorialiste, then you should!) sent me a message just before this concert started, saying how highly he thought of Daniel Barenboim’s recording of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony with the Staatskapelle Berlin: one of the few modern conductors to take the work seriously, he said. I also think highly of it and, amongst modern-ish recordings, I can only think of competition – the wrong word, I know – from Karajan’s final version, Sir Colin Davis in Dresden, and, as ever, the perennially underrated, overlooked, or simply ignored, Michael Gielen. (It is only the Ninth in Gielen’s cycle I find impossible to warm to, but then I have yet to find anyone, not even Klemperer, who is not found wanting next to Furtwängler; every other Gielen performance has something interesting, revealing, to say.)  Barenboim certainly took the Eighth seriously on this occasion, and it emerged as a far weightier, even greater work than many in the audience will doubtless have expected. There is no one ‘correct’ way to perform the work, of course, and the idea of a neo-Classical, slightly-backward, slightly-stylised glance can work well: witness the aforementioned Karajan performance. (I am sorry if that proves a red rag to any bulls.) Not for nothing, after all, was this a symphony Stravinsky greatly admired. That said, Barenboim’s treating the Eighth as a successor to the Seventh – to come, of course – rather than a different path was utterly convincing. Indeed, it made me wonder whether the understandable reversal of order in terms of programming was really necessary. Certainly the first movement was muscular, concentrated, poised very much on the cusp of ‘middle’- and ‘late’-period Beethoven, not unlike its fellow awkward-squad piece, the op.95 Quartett serioso, if undeniably more genial. Once again, it was impossible not to appreciate how much was missing in so much recent Beethoven performance, how a performance in which sonata form was properly dynamic – for one thing, the development developing – has, sadly, tragically even, become a rare bird in a positivist, or often merely would-be-positivist, age. (Is it possible to think of a composer more inimical to positivism than Beethoven?!) What Beethoven thought of the metronome was made abundantly clear in a magical account of the second movement. Such strictness, such restriction, is to be treated humorously; the joke relies upon it being anything but the norm. If here Beethoven remained very much a son of Haydn, his Mozartian heritage came far more strongly to the fore than one generally hears in the ravishing minuet. Its richness, almost labyrinthine, evoked models in Mozart’s late symphonies, likewise the woodwind writing, much praised by Stravinsky, and which the Divan players communicated so beautifully. The ‘difficulty’ of the finale was not resolved; it never should be. One needs to listen here; as Hans Keller remarked, it is easy until one does. A dynamism that related to form rather than formalism was Barenboim’s gift to this performance, the conclusion both succinct and resplendent, an apt description of both symphony and performance.  

I heard Michael Barenboim perform Anthèmes 2 in Berlin, in a Boulez eighty-fifth birthday concert. A little more than two years on, he seemed, after a slightly understated opening, to be more confident, as one might expect. There could certainly be no gainsaying his command of the score, and the tonal palette on which he drew seemed to have broadened considerably; if I might speak in terms of colours for a moment, one narrative one might trace, or invent, would be that of transmuting silver into gold. And again, what a revelation the Royal Albert Hall provides in terms of electronics. As with Jussef Eisa’s performance of Dialogue de l’ombre double, one might have thought the piece written for the hall, which one can say about few other musical works. Serial writing can rarely have sounded not only so inviting, but, in terms correspondent to Boulez’s æsthetic, so open-ended. Not for the first time, I thought of Nietzsche’s words in The Gay Science: ‘Indeed, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shone upon us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea”.’ Whatever post-modern sirens might say, whether with respect to Beethoven or Boulez, that sea is still open, if only we should have the courage to set sail.

The Seventh Symphony bore out that observation admirably. The introduction to the first movement took all the time it needed, and not one second longer. More importantly, it and the movement, indeed the symphony, as a whole, left one in no doubt that Beethoven – and Barenboim – knew where it was headed, without the slightest suspicion of pathways being closed off. All was obvious, deceptively simple, after the event; the owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk. Rhythmic impetus ran in tandem with its harmonic sister, Wagner’s misleadingly quoted description of the ‘apotheosis of the dance’ disproved, if one knew the Opera and Drama context from which it is generally wrenched. Where Wagner saw ‘individual’ arts wrested from one another, in need of recombination, Beethoven showed, especially with our hindsight of the previously heard Eighth, that not all roads lead to the ‘Word’ of the Ninth. Wagnerian music-drama is but one option ahead, though Barenboim intriguingly highlighted, consciously or otherwise, the extent to which there is common ground between apparently rather different methods of motivic working. The Allegretto, taken attacca, was swifter than Furtwängler would have taken it, but was possessed of a similar command of line. Once again, the way in which Beethoven transformed (French Revolutionary) processional into something of more metaphysical import was only something at which we could marvel, or rather which we could fully experience. The harmonic plan was both revealingly simple and deeply felt; no wonder Schopenhauer was led to the conclusions he drew about music as representation of the Will, and no wonder Wagner, disciple of both, followed suit, if ambiguously. A good test of a performance of the Seventh is whether the second return of the scherzo seems a little much. No such problem here, for not only was the relationship between scherzo and trio perfectly paced – no nonsense of barely slowing here – the playing was so alert, so responsive, that details one had undoubtedly heard before sounded newly-minted. Though the finale lacked nothing in vigour, there was none of the coldness or galumphing that all too often disfigures lesser performances. Form was clearly delineated or, better, dramatically presented, crowned by a coda all the more exciting for its organic, truly Furtwänglerian lineage.

Prom 9: WEDO/Barenboim (1) - Beethoven and Boulez, 20 July 2012

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven - Symphony no.1 in C major, op.21
Boulez – Dérive 2
Beethoven – Symphony no.2 in D major, op.36

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Images: BBC SO/Chris Christodoulou

Beethoven and Boulez have a great deal in common, but even more that dialectically relates them, without necessarily betokening common ground. The most obvious example, arguably, would be the deconstructive kinship between the Hammerklavier Sonata and Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata. Whatever one might think of the claim that, thereafter, sonata form had been destroyed – I am not unsympathetic, albeit willing to admit of intriguing exceptions – it is certainly the case that Beethoven’s example permitted such a claim and, more to the point, that it inspired the restless formal experimentation which, via Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, Debussy, Webern, et al., has both become expected of composers and inescapably linked, whether in emulation of or rebellion towards, Ravel’s grand sourd. A Beethoven cycle from the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim would be an event, no matter what; interspersed with works by Boulez, the prospect somehow advances even beyond the red-letter day. Beethoven found himself lumbered with pointless projections of his brooding if blurred image beneath the choir; Boulez was spared that indignity.

Barenboim elected to perform Beethoven’s First Symphony with what, for him, or at least for my expectations of him, was a relatively small orchestra: only four double basses, to give an impression. Nevetherless, the expectancy of the first movement’s introduction was in no way hampered by that; nor was the cultivation of the WEDO’s string sound. Would that more European orchestras, let alone others, could sound so at home with Beethoven. The exposition was taken relatively swiftly, again confounding or at least calling into question (my) expectations, without sounding in the slightest hard-driven. Finely articulated throughout and always impeccably goal-oriented – if ever one needed a single adjective for Beethoven it should surely be that – the reading was perhaps slightly more Haydnesque in spirit than I might have expected, certainly more so than Barenboim’s recording with the Staatskapelle Berlin. (It will be interesting to compare that with his recent WEDO recording.) I have wondered from time to time why Barenboim has not performed more Haydn; this performance suggested in no uncertain terms that he should, Haydn needsing advocates almost as much as Schoenberg, for whose cause Barenboim has offered unwavering support. Anyway, back to Beethoven. The line of his work was unbroken throughout, which should go without saying, but which is sadly a cause for jubilation, astonishment even, in an age of pseudo-‘authenticity’. There was development in the development section - a rarer thing than one might expect - and the coda acted as it should, aspiring towards the status of a second development. Further testament towards Barenboim’s rethinking was the almost courtly quality characterising the slow movement, adorable in its post-Mozartian poise and beauty. There were, of course, sterner responses, where Haydn’s shadow, not least from trumpets and drums, loomed larger, but the abiding memory remained that of the opening. The scherzo as so often proved perhaps the most unambiguously Beethovenian movement, peering at least as far into the future as the Seventh Symphony. Its propulsion was all the more impressive given that Barenboim did not mistake tempo for driving too hard. I do not recall ever having heard more delectable woodwind – well, save from the Vienna Philharmonic – in a trio that really stopped one’s heartbeat. Expectancy was once more the hallmark of the finale’s introduction, yet it led well-nigh perfectly, without undue portentousness, into the exposition proper. Weight emerged from within the music rather than being applied to it. The spirit of Beethoven was here, no doubt: what humanity, what life force emanating not only from every note but from its connection with every other. That, surely, is a fitting metaphor for the work of this miraculous orchestra. (Armchair nay-sayers know what they can do.)

The last time I had heard Dérive 2 had been under the direction of the composer himself, in aconcert of Boulez and Carter to mark the latter’s hundred birthday. Rather to my surprise, I found myself more readily, indeed rapturously, responding to Barenboim’s performance. How much was a matter of the context, it is difficult to say, but thoughts concerning Boulez’s often overlooked relationship towards Beethoven surfaced and informed my reaction. (Anyone wishing to sample Boulez’s Beethovenian credentials should listen to his excellent recording of the Fifth Symphony, praised to the skies by no less a musician than Sviatoslav Richter, yet never released on CD. I live in hope that some day Boulez’s Proms performance of the Missa Solemnis will be made available to hear.) Bar the coughing and an often fidgety audience – at least it did not applaud in the middle of the work, as it had during the Beethoven – I was more or less immediately reminded how, almost but not quite paradoxically, the problematical acoustic of the Royal Albert Hall will often favour chamber or ensemble pieces to all but the largest-scale symphonic works. One is drawn in rather than alienated. Barenboim’s performance pulsated with life, a tribute to the efforts of his WEDO musicians, whether Michael Barenboim on violin, whose contributions varied between Soldier’s Tale-like Stravinskian echoes to fully-fledged soaring lyricism, his string section companions, Ori Kam and Kyril Zlotnikov, about whom much the same might be said, joyful tuned percussion brought to us antiphonally by Dominic Oelze and Noya Schleien, or the almost jazzy (Ebony Concerto or Bartók’s Contrasts?) clarinet-playing of Jussef Eisa. I could and probably should have gone on to name every soloist, each one a virtuoso, a protagonist, and above all a musician. Boulez’s harmonies were relished without being milked, the hallmark of a fine post-Debussy musician, whether as conductor or composer. Purpose, which if not exactly Beethovenian, might conceivably be considered inspired or at least possessing kinship, was indelibly present throughout the three-quarters of an hour of this challengingly extended score. (Its first version was considerably shorter.) The sheer catchiness of some of the melodic threads should not but doubtless would have surprised some; let us hope that this example will send many running to other masterpieces from the Boulez canon. Perpetual transformation, the examples of Liszt and Wagner especially evident, brought to mind other instances within Boulez’s œuvres – the orchestral Notations, for instance – and operated as a highly dramatic force. As for the final unison: what a master-stroke!

Beethoven’s Second Symphony opened with duly imposing chords, responded to in melting – dare I say ‘feminine’, courting the gendered response of Susan McClary? – fashion. There was an apt sense of a tonal world ripe for exploration. Arrival and departure were signalled by the onset of the first movement exposition. Tension never let up, a quality that went hand in hand with a sense of spaciousness that occasionally recalled to me the Beethoven of Sir Colin Davis. The eruption of the coda stood unmistakeably in Furtwänglerian lineage. Wamth, soulfulness, and above all command of line characterised the slow movement. Rhetoric was integrated into the hole and all the more powerful for it; I could not help but contrast Barenboim’s performance with the hapless, almost bizarre, lack of harmonic rhythm one hears when Nikolaus Harnoncourt, far from the worst of his ilk, attacks Beethoven. The movement flowed – I suspect that it was taken relatively swiftly, though have no timings to back that up – yet by the same token effortlessly took its time, emphasising its Romantic scale. There was, moreover, a fine sense of chamber music writ large, a homage to the Classical divertimento. The scherzo again was unmistakeably from Beethoven’s stable, in concision, tension, and downright explosive quality. The dialectical struggle of the trio – vulgarly, between the delectable woodwind material and the whirlwind vortex of Romantic strings – would surely have come close to satisfying Adorno, or at least Hegel. I love Michael Gielen’s bracingly modernist way with the finale, but Barenboim’s old-world narrative wanted little in drama. Moreover, his Haydnesque approach of string figuration paid analytical as well as characterful dividends. I was left marvelling not only at the remarkably deep German sound Barenboim could draw from his orchestra but, more importantly still, at the staggering originality, whatever Beethoven’s roots, of his symphonic writing. Roll on the next concert.

Happy Birthday, Sir Colin!

A clip from my performance of the year so far. Click here to read more.

Prom 42: Mariinsky/Gergiev - Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake

Royal Albert Hall

Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre
Valery Gergiev (conductor)

Copyright: BBC/Chris Christodoulou

I am not one of those who asks, ‘Why perform a ballet score in concert?’ I enjoyed greatly Valery Gergiev’s LSO Proms performance of The Sleeping Beauty a few years ago, Romeo and Juliet from the same forces a little more recently, and have enjoyed more than one concert performance of The Nutcracker. Perhaps this is partly because I am anything but an expert on dance; perhaps it is still more a matter that if I think a score worth listening to, then I am not bothered by what can sometime seem extraneous visual effects. No one in his right mind would say that concert performances were a replacement for stagings, any more than when it comes to opera – though he might care to consider that concert performances of opera sometimes at least have a tendency to superior musical results. Moreover, nobody seems to have a problem with concert performances of Stravinsky’s ballet scores, or Ravel’s, or Debussy’s. And yet, on the evidence of this Prom, Swan Lake may be a different case.


Why so? Well, first, it is not nearly so fine a score as The Sleeping Beauty or The Nutcracker, despite undeniable historical importance. It has its moments, unforgettable moments, but it also has more than its fair share of longueurs. Heard in concert, which of course was never the intention, it ends up with an awful lot of resounding conclusions, sometimes, or so it seems, every couple of minutes. Introductions to introductions can seem the order of the day. Moreover, it is difficult to deny the vulgarity of some of Tchaikovsky’s score, likewise its occasional lack of direction. (Those who would take Liszt to task, often extremely unfairly, might direct their attention here.) Again, I am sure these faults will generally be mitigated when staged. But there was a particular quality to this performance that did Swan Lake no favours at all. The Mariinsky forces, as has been their dubious tradition, performed the score not as Tchaikovsky would conceivably have recognised it, but in a ‘performing version’ made in 1895 by Riccardo Drigo. Now this might be fair enough, or at least arguable, when staging the ballet, but in concert performance it smacks of laziness: this is what we do the rest of the year in St Petersburg – or indeed, across town at Covent Garden – so this is what you will hear now. Narrative and musical sense are often obliterated; Drigo’s interpolations, often orchestrations of numbers from Tchaikovsky’s Eighteen Piano Pieces, op.72, verge upon – I am trying to be generous – the nonsensical. To his credit, David Nice made no effort to spare Drigo in his programme notes, employing phrases such as ‘stylistically inappropriate and over-extended’. (One other point: it is an excellent idea sometimes to include special notes for children, especially in a work such as this. Must they, however, sound as if they come from a world in which the notorious Section 28 was still a real presence? ‘Marital status: Married – but only for nine weeks, after which he ran away and had a nervous breakdown.’)

What of the mauled score as it came down to us in performance? One would not expect a poor performance of this music from the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre and Gergiev, and we certainly did not hear one, though there was a startling breakdown of ensemble in the first act Scene in which the Princess is announced and commands her son, Siegfried, to marry. The Mariinsky strings glistened with vibrato; so, in true Russian style, did the brass. Gergiev could often prove rather driven, yet there was flexibility to be heard too, not least in the Introduction. That oboe swan solo was always delectably taken, against a backdrop of shimmering strings. There were times, however, when the music simply seemed rushed, as if conductor and players were keen to get it over with as soon as possible, the beginning of the second scene a case in point. At the other extreme, the Pas d’action in which prince and swan fall in love sounds over-extended, or at least did so here, in concert, the operatic origins (Tchaikovsky’s opera, Ondine) a little too clear, with violin aria followed by duet for violin and cello. If there were suspicions of autopilot at times, there could, however, be no denying the glorious blazing of moments such as the ball-scene opening of the second act. Soon after, trombones sounded as if they were intoning Fate itself. Indeed, there were several passages in which Gergiev seemed to draw attention to parallels with Tchaikovsky’s symphonies: a double-edged sword, for the lack of symphonic development, especially given Drigo’s bowdlerisation, came equally to the fore. As for the final scene, I am not sure that the turn to the major has ever convinced me musically. It did not here, for which the musicians can hardly be blamed, but was it necessary, or even desirable, for the brass to blare quite so much?

One should not begrudge a first ‘complete’ performance at the Proms, though the description, as we have seen, is at best misleading. I suspect it might be a little while, however, before we hear a second.

Prom 7: Belcea Quartet/Erben - Schubert String Quintet, 19 July 2011

Royal Albert Hall, London

Schubert - String Quintet in C major, D.956

Corina Belcea-Fisher (violin)
Axel Schacher (violin)
Krzysztof Chorleski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (violoncello)
Valentin Erben (violoncello)

On the face of it, chamber music in the Royal Albert Hall is an absurd prospect, yet on several occasions, I have found the way an excellent group of players can draw one in to provide for a more satisfying, often moving, experience than a typical orchestral performance, which can undoubtedly suffer form the hall’s barn-like acoustic. So it was here: doubtless the players would have sounded different in, say, the Wigmore Hall, but I remained utterly convinced.

For this was a distinguished reading indeed of Schubert’s C major quintet, full of ambivalence, regret, and yet determination. Life in the inner parts, from the very opening of the first movement, reminded one that life more generally must go on – even if, in Schubert’s own case, it would not. Framed by an inevitably fragile sadness, which never tipped over into the lachrymose, one realised that both life and death came out of the music, rather than appearing as tacked on pseudo-autobiographical concepts. Some beautifully hushed playing drew one in, ever underpinned by the driving force of Valentin Erben’s cello. Length was heavenly and yet all too mortal: I wished the movement could go on forever, yet at the same time began to realise that it was lulling me, Erlkönig-like, to enter into something beyond: the Romantic seduction of death itself. That call became even more marked in the slow movement, taken at a judicious tempo that neither dragged nor skipped. The vital sense of a heartbeat persisted, though, in a performance that was quite simply flawless, though not of the skated-over, superficial variety one occasionally associates with certain other quartets. Schubert’s sighing phrases elicited from the Belcea players a longing that rightly extended beyond eroticism. There was, moreover, real, heartfelt anger to be heard during the central episode. But applause: after this of all movements?! The only word for it, or the only printable one, is barbarism.

The scherzo was possessed of a vigour it is tempting to describe as Beethovenian, whilst the melodic gift revealed was of course entirely Schubert’s own. Well captured indeed was the balance between sadness and stillness of the trio: chillingly so, suggesting a song without words that both horrified and consoled. Despite, or rather on account of, the excellence of execution, the finale sounded like an uphill struggle, or at least its attempts to dance did, rhythms requiring ever more effort to achieve that aching swing. But then, featherlight articulation took over, to take us beyond that – though to what? This was Viennese in the best sense: unheimlich, Schubert revealing something that was already denied to successors such as Brahms.

Prom 6: Capuçons/Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France/Chung - Weber, Brahms, and Stravinsky, 19 July 2011

Royal Albert Hall

Weber – Oberon: Overture
Brahms – Concerto in A minor for violin and violoncello, op.102
Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring

Renaud Capuçon (violin)
Gautier Capuçon (violoncello)
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France
Myung-Whun Chung (conductor)

It seems that the core German repertoire is not really Myung-Whun Chung’s thing. Neither Weber’s Oberon overture nor Brahms’s Double Concerto received bad performances, but neither especially impressed – or if the latter did, it was on account of the soloists. Weber’s overture opened beautifully, the opening horn call (unconducted) as weich – the German seeming so much more apposite than ‘tender’ – as any I can recall. The rest of the introduction was very slow, yet retained its line. However, the ensuing Allegro proved too much of a contrast at breakneck speed, with an enormous slowing for the second subject that definitively turned the overture into a mere operatic pot pourri. The Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France played well throughout, though, clean string playing a decided boon in Weber’s brief fugato passage.

Chung’s Brahms again opened promisingly, the orchestra sounding more at home than it had during the previous night’s Beethoven Triple Concerto. There was a good sense of world-weariness, of swimming against the tide in an expansive account, which permitted one to hear and to consider a wealth of instrumental detail – this truly is the land of developing variation, whence Schoenberg hails – if ultimately there would prove to be a little too much ‘mere’ accompaniment from the podium. The richness of Gautier Capuçon’s cello tone was an immediate joy upon his entry, his brother Renaud’s violin equally delectable, once again displaying a golden-age ability so elegantly to turn a phrase. It was the soloists who performed most of the dramatic shaping, but they accomplished that most convincingly. And how they sang, whether alternately, or in duet, never more so than in the almost Elgar-like lines of the slow movement. The finale benefited from a perfectly chosen tempo, the cello’s voicing of the second theme and the violin’s response a particular joy. Greater fire from Chung would have helped, though; he sounded too relaxed. Once again, it was left to the Capuçons to provide direction, which they maintained, even intensified, in a mesmerising encore performance of the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia. It made one long for more Baroque music from this quarter.

Chung emerged as a conductor transformed for The Rite of Spring – which, notably, he conducted without a score. The OPRF sounded in its element too, from the opening, unmistakeably ‘French’-toned bassoon, to the last. I was intrigued by the way the rest of the woodwind blended with and cast into relief the bassoon to turn the Introduction into a strange variety of Harmoniemusik – at least until the intervention of a mobile telephone. Rhythms were tight throughout, but also generative, Stravinsky’s cellular method properly to the fore. (It is perhaps worth noting that Chung appeared to use Boulez’s redrawing of the bar lines.) Energy never sapped, permitting that extraordinary melodic profusion that is the Rite’s greatest boast truly to be heard, never more so than in the sage’s music. If I say that the orchestra’s playing was cultivated, then I mean it in the best sense: it was not precious, but treated the music as music rather than as an extravaganza, dynamic gradations of an almost infinite nature proving especially telling. The percussion section deserves particular note, unfailingly secure in rhythm and in the precise presentation of colour. This excellent Rite was followed by a brief, showy encore from Carmen.

Prom 71: CSO/Haitink, 8 September 2008

Royal Albert Hall

Turnage – Chicago Remains (European premiere)
Mahler – Symphony no.6 in A minor

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink (conductor)

The warmth of applause for Bernard Haitink as he walked towards the podium testified once again to the affection and gratitude London and this country more generally will always feel for the saviour of the Royal Opera. This, however, is the first time that we have had the opportunity to hear Haitink as Principal Conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. What was immediately striking – and continued to be so throughout – was the extent to which Haitink has continued Daniel Barenboim’s work in ridding this great orchestra of the excessive brashness that could sometimes disfigure its performances under Sir Georg Solti (and beyond him, Fritz Reiner). At the same time, however, a little more bite might not have gone amiss in the otherwise excellent performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

First on the menu was the European premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Chicago Remains. Following hot on the heels of a fine performance of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, I was inevitably reminded of the earlier work by the opening percussion figures, although difference announced itself too: the mechanical sounds of the city rather than pantheistic ecstasy. The suggestion of a train whistle brought to mind Chicago’s Union Station. Indeed, I fancied that the entire progress of the quarter-hour work suggested a train journey, with as much emphasis upon the journey as upon the train, thereby distinguishing it from a work such as Honegger’s Pacific 231. The gleaming Chicago skyline was almost audibly visible too, and so was a seamier side to city life, jazz being suggested through instrumentation and turns of phrase rather than compositional method, which was undoubtedly more substantial. Few composers would neglect the opportunity to allow this orchestra’s fabled brass section to shine; Turnage did not. Following some more brutalistic moments, characterised by trumpet fanfares and great chordal slabs of orchestral sound, the final section of the work proved touchingly elegiac, not least in a superbly-taken oboe solo melody. Haitink is not most noted for commitment to contemporary music, although a glance at his Concertgebouw programmes belies any suggestion of undue conservatism; recordings can often deceive. At any rate, it is difficult to imagine that Turnage could have hoped for better advocacy than he received here, either from the orchestra or from the conductor, who had also premiered his song-cycle Some Days at the 1991 Proms.

The first movement of the Mahler began at quite a brisk pace, relentless even, which is not inappropriate. Once again, I do not think the Royal Albert Hall helped, since there were some odd balances from my seat, in spite of Haitink’s general care with blending. Whilst the orchestra played superbly, it lacked that last ounce of ‘character’ of some ensembles, at least at their best. One of Haitink’s strengths was illustrated by his willingness to let the development take its time, to linger even in some passages. This seems to be a more pronounced characteristic of his present view of this work than earlier recordings would suggest. Whilst there was not a radical reinterpretation of this movement, it was not so ‘tragic’ as it can often sound.

In the Scherzo, placed second, the opening properly shadowed the opening of the first movement. This underlined the rightness of Haitink’s decision concerning movement order: musical considerations came first. The woodwind’s skeletal shiver was well-nigh perfect and the horns in concert sounded marvellous. There was great rhythmic strength but also a duly ‘Classical’ – if not in the authenticists’ sense – yielding for the trio sections. Moreover, and perhaps slightly to my surprise, Haitink did not shrink from bringing out the modernistic strangeness of the orchestration. Each section was clearly characterised, with sometimes daring contrasts of tempo, and if I occasionally wondered whether this was slightly to the detriment of the whole, my doubts were confounded, since it ultimately ‘worked’. This movement marked, I think, the true highpoint of the performance.

The opening of the third movement was somewhat neutral – and rightly so. It needs plenty of space to be built upon, and even then, not too much. There is – and was in this performance – no contradiction between the salon-ish quality of the theme and the wealth of musical riches that Schoenberg discovered in his celebrated analysis of the movement. Haitink traced the contours of the principal theme’s progress as lovingly as Schoenberg had. A beautiful horn solo pointed the way forward to the Nachtmusik of the Seventh Symphony. Yet there remained a nagging doubt that the movement was just a little underplayed, a little too placid, although this is certainly preferable to erring in the opposite direction. (Remember ‘Gergiev’s Mahler’?) The great climax was, however, all the more powerful for its lack of exaggeration. Indeed, its non-neurotic quality was positively Brucknerian, perhaps not surprisingly given Haitink’s greatness as a Bruckner conductor. The end of the movement found a wonderful peace, physically and metaphysically, subsiding into a blissful nothingness.

With the opening of the finale, it seemed that unalloyed tragedy had finally come upon us. (Should it have been there from the outset? I cannot deny that that would have been a preferable course to me, but there are alternative paths.) Yet the movement as a whole still exhibited at times a ‘Classical’ restraint, although terror certainly raised its head with the cataclysmic hammer-blows. The contrapuntal music was as well handled as I have ever heard, exhibiting both clarity and tonal weight, in a fashion that reminded me of the final movement of the Fifth Symphony. Haitink was clearly alert to links, thematic and otherwise, between the three Rückert symphonies. The brass sounded predictably yet nevertheless wonderfully Fafner-like at the end and there was true desolation as we achieved nihilistic closure. My only real reservation was that, in the final analysis – and this probably goes for the performance as a whole – the performance did not quite sound as though it had been conceived in one long span, Haitink’s long experience in the symphonic repertoire notwithstanding. It is unfortunate that I still had Pierre Boulez’s Berlin performance from last year resounding in my memory. Not only had Boulez’s reading exhibited that Furtwänglerian quality of Fernhören – even in non-Furtwänglerian repertoire – but it had truly sounded a fitting performance for Holy Saturday, as Christ lay in the bonds of Hell. Despite Boulez’s reputation, it was Haitink’s performance that ultimately sounded more ‘observed’ and ‘detached’.

Prom 70: Saint François d'Assise, 7 September 2008, Netherlands Opera/Metzmacher

Royal Albert Hall

St Francis – Rod Gilfry
Angel – Heidi Grant Murphy
Leper – Hubert Delamboye
Brother Leo – Henk Neven
Brother Masseo – Charles Workman
Brother Elias – Donald Kaasch
Brother Bernard – Armand Arapian
Brother Sylvester – Jan Willem Balijet
Brother Rufus – André Morsch

The Netherlands Opera

Chorus of the Netherlands Opera (chorus master: Martin Wright)
The Hague Philharmonic Orchestra
Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

Even a concert performance of Messiaen’s St François d’Assise could hardly fail to be an event. As a centrepiece of the Proms centenary celebrations, this Netherlands Opera performance, more or less shorn of its Amsterdam production, was certainly a memorable occasion. It was disappointing that the audience was so small; in my naïveté, I had assumed that the rarity value alone would have guaranteed a large house, perhaps even a sell-out. The performance nevertheless received rapturous acclaim from true believers at the end of its well-nigh six hours (inclusive of two intervals).

There were many things to praise in this performance. The Hague Philharmonic Orchestra played very well, with especially valued contributions from its woodwind and percussion sections. The opening material, which returns throughout the opera, from awesomely synchronised tuned percussion was arresting, transfixing even, likewise the punchy wind ritornello that runs in parallel throughout the first scene. Messiaen’s huge woodwind – including seven (!) clarinets – and percussion sections – ten players in total – were throughout given their full head, nowhere more so than in the numerous auditions of the Gerygone (piccolos, xylophone, and glockenspiel). The unusual seating, with strings on the left of the conductor and wind to the right underlined visually and audibly the sectional writing. Percussion ran along the back of the stage, whilst the three ondes martenot were positioned one immediately in front of the conductor, with the other two in boxes on either side of the hall, again providing a fine sense of spatial awareness. One case in which this truly paid dividends was in the bizarre scoring for low ondes, double basses and contrabassoon during Lauds. Nor should one forget the strings. The sequence of exultation and ravishing, transformative orchestral beauty (strings and ondes) upon the healing of the Leper was unforgettable, as was the Angel’s musical performance (strings and ondes again): ethereal, divine music. The brass section really came into its own shortly afterwards and for the final scene, depicting St Francis’s death. Here was true majesty.

The ritual basis of the work came across very clearly, never more so than in the opening exchanges between St Francis and Brother Leo, which put me in mind of those between Mime and the Wanderer in Siegfried. On the other hand, there were passages in which the music and drama – such as it is – dragged, most of all in the latter half of the long second act. Whilst Ingo Metzmacher’s direction was for the most part impressive, the length of this act and the preponderance – at least after the rejuvenated fourth scene depicting the Journeying Angel – of contemplative music prepares a trap of somnolence that is very difficult to avoid. Rhythms, especially when it came to birdsong, were commendably tight. However, I did not feel that the score had always been quite so internalised as on, say, Kent Nagano’s superlative live recording from Salzburg. I also felt that Metzmacher might have wrung more sweetness, even sickliness out of the strings, on certain occasions. (Simon Rattle’s Turangalîla still echoed in my mind.) Metzmacher and the other performers were not, of course, helped by the lack of staging. This is no fault of the Proms, but sometimes I missed what might have come from a fully staged performance. In many senses, Messiaen’s work is an oratorio of distinct scenes or frescoes rather than an opera as conventionally or even unconventially understood, yet it nevertheless appears to cry out for staging. We should be grateful to the Proms for its contribution, whilst petitioning our opera companies – above all, the Royal Opera – to carry out their duty.

The solo singing was good, although there was a lack of any truly charismatic ‘star’ performance, which might have elevated the dramatic experience onto another level. In the title role, Rod Gilfry’s performance was of a generally high standard, although he lost the competitive edge with the orchestra on a few occasions. He acted as much as he could, making me want to see him in a full production, in which what seemed to be an impressively detailed characterisation might shine more fully. One could forgive his tiring towards the end of the second act and in parts of the third, but at the same time one could not help but notice it. Messiaen said that he wanted the soprano Angel’s voice to ‘be almost as pure as Pamina’s in The Magic Flute’. Heidi Grant Murphy achieved this to some extent, yet there were times when her voice became quite tremulous. The principal problem with her performance was the diction. I was extremely grateful for the text and translation in the programme, since the proportion of words that were comprehensible was often small indeed. Hubert Delamboye presented a vividly characterised Leper, with notably more idiomatic French than some other members of the cast. Whilst Hank Leven’s Brother Leo was eminently credible in dramatic terms – even without any staging to speak of – his repeated statements of ‘J’ai peur’ suffered from surprisingly strange vowel sounds. His sweet yet vulnerable tenor otherwise seemed just right for the role. Although it is a relatively small role, I was probably most impressed by Charles Workman’s Brother Masseo, which in its combination of thoughtfulness, musicality, and palpable practical piety – if you will forgive the excessive alliteration – seemed to me in every respect beyond reproach.

Overall, it was the third act that left the most powerful impression, not least through the outstanding choral contribution. In a 1992 interview with Jean-Christophe Marti, Messiaen remarked: ‘The stigmata represent the supreme mark if divinity on man, and this mark is painful.’ The composer was certainly convinced of the literal truth in this respect concerning St Francis, and indeed others, pointing to ‘a volume of eyewitness accounts, Considerations on the Stigmata, [which] leaves us in no doubt as to the veracity of the facts concerning Saint Francis’. The burning quality – in more than one sense – of Messiaen’s conviction is unmistakeable in the seventh scene and was unmistakeable in the performance. The chorus truly came into its own, here speaking as Christ: ‘C’est Moi, c’est Moi, c’est Moi, je suis l’Alpha et l’Oméga.’ In one sense, one might think of the opening Burning Bush scene from Moses und Aron. However, the apocalyptic nature of Messiaen’s vision is powerfully conveyed not through contrapuntal means but through solid blocks of homophony. The ecstasy of the chorus at the scene’s close was so strong that the lack of staging was now totally forgotten. In the following scene, the final chorus of the work brimmed with apocalyptic fervour and brought the performance to an overwhelming conclusion.

St François should perhaps be understood a synthetic work, like Busoni’s Doktor Faust, although I am not sure that Messiaen’s opera, despite its confessional advantage, has quite the Aquinas-like sense of summation of Busoni’s, its unfinished state notwithstanding. There is something compendious to St François. As Messiaen himself observed, ‘it contains virtually all the bird calls that I’ve noted down in the course of my life, all the colours of my chords, all my harmonic procedures.’ And yet, there are sections in which variety does appear to be lacking. Messiaen’s assemblage, his trademark juxtaposition in place of development, does not achieve uniformly favourable results, especially when confronted with so vast a time-span. Eternity, so often the composer’s concern, is not at all the same thing as a long time; indeed, if it can be dealt with or even hinted at at all, it is often better treated in the twinkling of an eye. Comparisons with Wagner seem to me quite to miss the point, serving only to draw attention to the lack of plasticity in much of Messiaen’s material and a less than infallible dramatic sense. As I mentioned above, the lack of staging was something of a problem in this respect, although one should doubtless not exaggerate. At its best, however, St François d’Assise stands as a monument to the belief, imagination, and accomplishment of one of the great composers of the twentieth century. It also reminds us that he stood both close to and yet distinct from many of that century’s most central compositional concerns. This distance could sometimes be a weakness yet could equally be a strength; it undoubtedly testifies to the astonishing singularity of Olivier Messiaen and his music.

Prom 64: BPO/Rattle - Wagner and Messiaen, 2 September 2008

Royal Albert Hall

Wagner – Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I and ‘Liebestod’
Messiaen – Turangalîla-Symphonie

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Tristan Murail (ondes martenot)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

The myth of Tristan and Isolde was an important inspiration for Messiaen’s Turangalîla symphony. More importantly, Wagner’s music was substantial enough – perhaps something of an understatement – to provide a first part to this concert in itself, without exhausting players or audience. Indeed, it left me wanting to hear more of Tristan und Isolde from Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Whilst I have never quite been able to eradicate my doubts concerning the ‘rightness’ – as much tonal as dramatic – of performing the Prelude to Act I followed by the so-called ‘Liebestod’, this performance was as fine as I have heard in separation from the rest of Wagner’s drama. The opening ’cello A was at least as beautifully soft as I have heard – in any performance, complete or otherwise – thereby allowing the ensuing phrase to swell to perfection, and with not only a ravishing but a deeply expressive vibrato, thus setting the pattern for the following sequences. This music was taken marvellously slowly too, whilst at the same time always moving forward. The oboe solo was just as beautiful, once again with perfectly judged vibrato. Rattle’s reading was seamless yet far from uneventful, reminiscent indeed of Karajan. Wave upon wave built up, gathering pace each time until the superbly judged climax. The transition to the ‘Liebestod’ was not helped by a barrage of coughs but was as good as one could hope for, given the inherent tonal difficulty in connection the two excerpts. This was very much – and rightly so – a Verklärung (Wagner’s own term, meaning ‘transfiguration’) for Isolde rather than a Liebestod (‘love-death’). Wagner and therefore we owed Liszt an almost incalculable debt, both literally and figuratively, yet we have him to blame for this misnomer, which has caused no end of confusion ever since. No matter: Rattle conveyed joy, release, even optimism – Lohengrin is Wagner’s only real tragedy – in a performance that pulsated with life. Rattle was punctilious in revealing details of scoring, resulting in a refreshingly Boulezian account, alive – and with especial aptness in the context of this particular programme – to the music’s legacy for French as well as German music. A daring ritardando at the close paid off handsomely.

After the interval, there followed a fine performance of the Turangalîla symphony, which went deeper than many contemporary, ‘showpiece’ renditions. Rhythms were tight and implacable where necessary, whilst the music extended and luxuriated when that was called for. From the first movement, the ‘Introduction’, there was a commendable clarity, even when different themes were superimposed upon one another. The trombone ‘statue’ them, here and elsewhere, sounded appropriately Mussorgskian; indeed, I do not recall ever hearing it so much revealing this heritage. There were also some splendidly piercing sounds, ratcheting the decibel count to a level that – whisper it! – would doubtless have concerned European Union snoopers. In the first ‘Chant d’amour’, the contrast Rattle drew between the opening two themes, the trumpets’ triumphant shout and the almost sickly sweet response from the strings and the excellent Tristan Murail on ondes martenot, was clear, yet I wondered whether it might have been still more sharply drawn. This was more or less my only cavil concerning the performance, however, and it might well be objected that the two themes in any case need to come together to form the symphony’s composite love-theme. There was an air of mystery from the very outset of the first ‘Turangalîla’ movement. It was not quite clear what the question, let alone the answer, might be – which is just as it should be, and all the more Tristan-esque. I can sympathise with Boulez’s practice during a 1973 Prom, of performing only the three ‘Turangalîla’ movements, yet ultimately that would be far too high a price to pay for fastidious taste. Messiaen explained the ‘lîla’ part of his title as denoting ‘play’ in Sanskrit: ‘play in the sense of the divine action upon the cosmos, the play of creation, of destruction, of reconstruction, the play of life and death.’ This sense of play was caught unerringly in the woodwind during the opening of the fourth movement, the second ‘Chant d’amour’. If the rest of the movement went on a bit, then that is not the fault of the performers. The piano cadenza was superlatively rendered by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who played from memory throughout. And the final bars attained true serenity.

The ‘Joie du sang des étoiles’ sounded bizarrely and appositely of Hollywood. Ondes martenot, strings, and celesta were very much to the fore, with excellent contributions from the brass. Try as I might – and in all honesty, I did not try so very hard – I really could not resist. One could hardly censure Rattle for milking the climax; it cries out for this. It is hardly the place for Boulezian anti-rhetoric. (Or is it? We shall have to wait for a different performance to find out.) The tranquillity of muted strings and ondes martenot then provided a perfect setting against which the following movement’s piano and woodwind phrases could tell. Clarinet and flute were especially notable in this ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’. The languor of sleep – Messiaen spoke of lovers ‘outside time’ – was exquisitely captured. Here the length seems more justified and certainly more welcome than it had been in the fourth movement. The opening piano cadenza of the second ‘Turangalîla’ movement was once again dazzlingly rendered, as was the following passage for ondes martenot and trombones. The Berlin Philharmonic’s percussion section grasped the opportunity to shine here. As a whole, the movement’s strangeness was powerfully conveyed and its concision was most welcome.

One certainly could not accuse the following ‘Développement de l’amour’ of concision. Yet the combination of the work’s various themes was very well handled, each retaining its character whilst gaining something by the juxtaposition and new contexts. (I am not at all sure that there is any real ‘development’ here, but never mind.) The movement’s climax was duly exultant. For the third and final ‘Turangalîla’ movement, the orchestra’s woodwind soloists once again proved outstanding, helping to prepare an impressive sense of inevitability for the piano’s capture of their theme. Rattle again excelled in facilitating the combination of themes. The finale rejoiced in a fitting sense of ‘occasion’, a true culmination to a notable performance of this extraordinary work.

Prom 48: Gürzenich Orchestra/Stenz, 22 August 2008

Royal Albert Hall

Mahler – Symphony no.5
Stockhausen – Punkte
Schubert (orch. David Matthews) – Ständchen, D921
Schubert (orch. Manfred Trojahn) – Bei dir allein, D866/2
Schubert (orch. Colin Matthews) – Nacht und Träume, D827
Schubert (orch. Detlev Glanert) – Das Lied im Grünen, D917
Beethoven – Overture: Leonore III, Op.72b

Angelika Kirchschlager (mezzo-soprano)
Apollo Voices
Gürzenich Orchestra, Cologne
Markus Stenz (conductor)

Once again, Roger Wright has displayed great flair in terms of programming: properly understood, one of the most difficult yet rewarding aspects of concert-planning, yet all too often dismally lacking in imagination or even thought. This was a ‘re-creation’ of the 1904 first performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in Cologne, albeit with a couple of significant twists. Stockhausen’s Punkte, also premiered in Cologne, joined the programme on the composer’s eightieth birthday, and orchestrations of the four Schubert songs were commissioned. With the exception of Punkte, however, the performances did not really live up to this promise.

That of the Mahler symphony was not bad; I have heard far worse. Yet one needs rather more than that in Mahler, or ultimately in any great music. This, I think, is one of the most difficult of Mahler’s symphonies to bring off, not unlike Beethoven’s Fifth, which also this year was treated to imaginative programming and yet given an indifferent performance, considerably more so than the Mahler in fact. The opening Funeral March was taken at a swift initial tempo: more march than funereal. Unfortunately, the solo trumpet proved fallible, which seemed to induce a lack of confidence amongst the rest of the orchestra. A number of passages were not quite together and there were more slips than one can simply write off. There followed considerable flexibility and the stormy sections were taken quite fast indeed, but not too fast. There was a rather impressive sense of a nightmarish, ghostly procession of contrasts, reminding one of Mahler’s debts to Berlioz. I liked the second movement, completing the First Part of the symphony. Here there was the same quality of a nightmarish procession, with something of a ghostly puppet show too. There were some marvellously ominous passages of stillness, not least that with ’cellos and kettledrum. Leader Ursula Maria Berg proved a fine soloist. The chorale received a duly splendid statement and disintegrated in a fine, neurotic style that was too often missing from the rest of the symphony.

In the Scherzo (Part Two), the strings often lacked quite so full a tone as would have been desirable, although this may partly have been a consequence of the venue’s acoustic. More seriously, the opening section was taken not only too fast – Mahler writes nicht zu schnell (‘not too fast’) – but far too lightly. This is a scherzo, but it needs vigour; it should be kräftig (‘strong’ or ‘powerful’. If not quite Mahler as Delibes, the performance edged in that direction. The splendidly eerie woodwind provided some compensation and subsequent statements of the opening material had greater weight, profitably suggesting this movement’s transitional status. The scherzo hurtled to a thrilling and suitably ambiguous conclusion, although sadly too much damage had already been done.

The Adagietto was taken swiftly in the modern fashion, although it was in no sense unyielding. It was rather very much a love letter from Mahler to Alma, without a hint of world-weariness; death, let alone its Venetian variety, was not on the menu. The finale was attacked immediately, the ‘busy’ nature of its mock-Bachian counterpoint registering very well, even if it sometimes sounded a little too fast for its slightly pedantic quality to shine through. (It needs to have something of Die Meistersinger to it.) This counterpoint was wittily punctuated by strongly-taken brass interjections. The episodes were well characterised, although again they sometimes lacked the desirable fullness of orchestral tone. I worried when the chorale began at a strangely fast tempo, but it worked given the liveliness of the orchestral detail below. There was a sense of fun to the conclusion, but it did not sound hard won enough. As a whole, then, this reading of the symphony was pretty much all there structurally, save for the opening of the Scherzo, but it needed at least a little more horror, extremity, passion, and phantasmagoria.

Stockhausen’s Punkte received the finest performance of the evening, here in its final revision of 1993. It was visually and aurally striking to have two harps facing each other at the front of the orchestra. This and other spatial details were truly enabled to tell. One heard how the ‘points’ of the initial 1952 version became groups and even melodies. Stockhausen, Stenz, and the orchestra were ‘joining up the dots’, as it were, forming constellations from the original, pointillistic star music. There was much activity, counterbalanced by oases of sustained stillness. Some of the more ‘starry’ sounds, especially from strings and percussion, seemed to be straining towards the electronic means Stockhausen would soon adopt, although this remained very much a work for orchestra, or at least for large ensemble. The splendid brass climax for three trombones proved a far more overwhelming experience than anything in the Mahler. This was a performance of great intensity and drama, both in terms of its outbursts and the greater line. It is a pity, then, to report that much of the audience seemed rather restless. Having wildly applauded the Mahler, it once again displayed a lack of discernment.

The Schubert orchestrations, I am sad to report, proved a major disappointment, the single exception being that by Colin Matthews: Nacht und Träume. Matthews adopted a darker, more imaginative orchestral sound than his fellow composers, rather akin to Mahler or Wagner, especially Tristan: an interestingly Novalis-like take upon the night and dreams of Matthäus von Collin’s text. The important role for solo trumpet, often doubling the vocal line, was impressively sustained in a quite unsettling performance. Matthews’s brother David and Manfred Trojahn both adopted an early-ish-Romantic sounding orchestra, redolent of Mendelssohn or, at a push, Berlioz without the colour. David Matthews’s Ständchen relied a great deal – too much? – on pizzicato and woodwind. It had a more warmly Romantic postlude, with a touch of Wagner in the orchestration and harmony, although I am not sure that this attempt, as Matthews put it, ‘to move the song into a different world’, really worked. Trojahn’s orchestration lacked even this originality. Detlev Glanert’s Das Lied im Grünen was again rather conventional. It clearly aimed to impart a sense of the countryside, with woodwind solos aplenty, although some of it sounded oddly like the lighter Elgar. It was pretty enough but showed no particular insight. What we needed was a creative re-imagination along the lines of Hans Zender. Angelika Kirchshlager was an excellent soloist, her diction commendably clear and her musical line always carefully shaped. Apollo Voices worked well in their interplay with her in Ständchen. (What a pity, then, that the BBC printed the text to the wrong Ständchen in the programme: Rellstab rather than Grillparzer. Anyone can make mistakes, but someone really should have checked and picked up on this.)

Beethoven’s third Leonore overture received the weakest performance of the night. I do not think that this should be attributed principally to tiredness, although there were signs of that in a number of technical errors; Stenz’s conception that was to blame. The overture began with a distinctly ‘authenticke’ lack of vibrato in the strings and soon burst forth far too fast. Throughout, it sounded unduly sectional, with little sense of a greater symphonic whole: this for the work in which Beethoven went beyond the operatic overture to create a self-standing symphonic poem. The brass blared crudely and the trumpet solo from above was far too loud. Like the rest of the performance, it utterly lacked mystery or any sense of the metaphysical. We were subjected to a vulgar dash to the finishing line, even though we were as yet nowhere near that line. And so, there was a massive slowing before a repeated dash. Again, the audience appeared to love the performance, but I cannot for the life of me understand why. As an encore, we had a much better performance of a bleeding chunk from Parsifal’s Transformation Music. The orchestra as a whole was in superior form, and Stenz delineated the excerpt’s form – I realise that this edges towards a contradiction – with commendable clarity. Whether Wagner’s music benefits from thus being torn out of context is at best debatable, but the putative debate must surely be put behind us when, owing to the lack of bells, the arrangement began repeating earlier music over and over again, as if Wagner were a godfather of American minimalism.

Prom 45: BBC SSO/Volkov, et al., 19 August 2008

Royal Albert Hall

Harvey – Tombeau de Messiaen
Messiaen – Concert à quatre
Harvey – Mortuos plango, vivos voco
Harvey (with Gilbert Nouno and Arshia Cont: IRCAM computer music designers) – Soundings (world premiere)
Varèse – Poème électronique
Varèse – Déserts

Cédric Tiberghien (piano)
Emily Beynon (flute)
Alexei Ogrintchouk (oboe)
Danjulo Ishizaka (’cello)
Jonathan Harvey (sound projection: Harvey)
Jerémie Henrot and Clément Marie (IRCAM sound projection: Soundings)
Ben Bayliss and Chris Beddall (sound projection: Varèse)

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov (conductor)

Interesting and intelligent programming may prove to be a hallmark of Roger Wright’s tenure at the Proms. One can only hope so following the previous dispensation, much of which has remained in evidence during this ‘changeover’ season. At the heart of the programme lay the music of Jonathan Harvey, a fine composer, far too often overlooked in his own country. It would seem that his marriage of modernism, not least a keen interest in French spectralism and electronics, and a deep, syncretic spirituality – yes, I too generally run a mile upon hearing that word; but this is the real thing, not the easy-access, synthetic bells and smells of the ‘holy minimalists’ – has not always appealed to the English empirical temperament. All the more reason then to grant him such a splendid opportunity as this. Harvey studied with Messiaen and the two composers’ concerns in various ways overlap. An ongoing association with IRCAM – brain-child of Boulez, another Messiaen pupil – brought us the classic electronic work, Mortuos plango, vivos voco, and a new work, Soundings, co-commissioned by the BBC, IRCAM, and Radio France, as the third and final part of a trilogy ‘referring to the Buddhist purification of body, mind, and speech’. Soundings was composed by Harvey as Composer-in-Association to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, who premiered it this evening. And then, for the third part of the concert, we turned to the still-bracing dawn of electronic music, to the work of Varèse. Having questioned the suitability of the Royal Albert Hall for various more ‘conventional’ works, I am happy to report that, on this occasion, the space worked very well. This may partly have been owed to the vagaries of seating – even sitting a few seats away appears to make quite a difference here – yet the space itself added something important, visually and acoustically, to the electronic works.

Harvey’s Tombeau de Messiaen, for piano and digital tape, opened the programme. In a brief programme note, Harvey cited Messiaen as a ‘protospectralist ... fascinated by the colours of the harmonic series and its distortions, ... [who] found therein a prismatic play of light’. And so, the tape part of this 1994 tribute is made of twelve piano sounds tuned to the harmonic series, one for each pitch class. The piano part, in equal temperament of course, then plays with these series, both combining with and distorting them: ‘never entirely belonging, never entirely separate’. This interplay was dazzlingly captured by Cédric Tiberghien, as were the bell-like echoes – a slightly nauseous yet colourful pealing – not only of Messiaen but also, I fancied, of the Debussy of La cathédrale engloutie. ‘Echoes’ was also the operative word for the crucial role of the hall. Harvey and Tiberghien exploited the full extremities of the keyboard, before moving to a piercing climax of an almost Messiaenesque ecstasy.

Concert à quatre (1990-92) is Messiaen’s final work, completed by Yvonne Loriod, in consultation with Heinz Holliger and George Benjamin. From the very first notes, it is instantly recognisable as Messiaen, indeed as the work of the same composer who, compositional developments notwithstanding, had written L’Ascension sixty years earlier. Emily Beynon and Alexei Ogrintchouk are both principals with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, whose long experience with French music was surely valuable here, but the BBC SSO too managed to sound convincingly ‘modern French’ (think of the Orchestre de Paris or the Orchestre National de France). In the first movement, the Entrée, it was once again Tiberghien’s opportunity to shine, the piano being treated as a solo instrument apart from the rest of the concertante group. Needless to say, he grasped this opportunity, exhibiting glistening tone and dazzling rhythmical precision. The orchestra’s ten (!) percussionists, including wind-machine, certainly made their presence felt too, though never unduly. For the second movement Vocalise, Messiaen transcribed with ornamentation a piece he had written in 1935 for a series of vocal studies. It is tribute to the constancy of his style and voice, that this in no sense sounded out of place. The beautiful A major melody, ‘warmed’, in Paul Griffiths’s excellent choice of verb, by the composer’s third mode of limited transposition, was passed between each of the soloists in turn, the orchestra here being of secondary importance, timbral ‘warming’ furnished by a limited number of strings. Beynon presented a ravishingly lyrical opening, followed by an equally heart-stopping duet between oboe and piano, Ogrintchouk being possessed, it would seem, of unlimited and luxurious reserves of line and breath. The unapologetically Romantic ’cello entry was meltingly taken by BBC New Generation Artist, Danjulo Ishizaka, who also shone in the ensuing Cadenza. So too did the combined forces of the xylophone, xylorimba, and marimba. For the final Rondeau, Ilan Volkov clearly delineated its verse-refrain form. He and his players also imparted a welcome sense of the apocalyptic. The dialogue between piano and bells took on an aptly ecclesiastical tinge as versicle and response. This movement teemed, quite properly, with life and joy.

Mortuos plango, vivos voco, for eight-channel tape (1980), was inspired by the sounds of bells and choristers at Winchester Cathedral, where Harvey’s son had sung. The largest bell has inscribed upon it the text: HORAS AVOLANTES NUMERO, MORTUOS PLANGO, VIVOS AD PRECES VOCO (‘I count the fleeing hours, I lament the dead, I call the living to prayer’). Harvey cleverly – and movingly – conveys this through the ‘dead’, however rich, sound of the bell and the ‘live’ sound of the boy, the audience inside the surrounding sound of the former, whilst the latter ‘flies freely around’. I was reminded not only of the English cathedral tradition– and of English cathedrals themselves –but also of the strange, threatening, yet ineffably beautiful Venice of Nono. It was interesting to note how very much more human, less alien, this work sounded than Stockhausen’s COSMIC PULSES had a couple of weeks before. This is new music concerned with utterly ‘traditional’ Christian concerns of life and death, nowhere more so than in the dying away al niente of the bell sounds. The hall itself took on an aptly Gothic splendour as the frame for the music.

In Soundings, Harvey explains, he ‘wanted to bring together orchestral music and human speech. It is as if the orchestra is learning to speak, like a baby with its mother, or like first man, or like listening to a highly expressive language we don’t understand. The rhythms and emotional tones of speech are formed by semantics, but even more they are formed by feelings – in that respect they approach song.’ Quite apart from the eloquence with which the composer elucidated the imperative behind his work, this is very much what we heard, for which tribute should also be paid to Volkov and his excellent orchestra. (How very different from the dispiriting Mahler and Damnation of Faust I heard them give at the Proms a few years ago.) The Ur-quality of the opening inevitably brought to mind earlier ‘creations’ of music out of the void: The Creation, Das Rheingold, Berg’s Op.6 Orchestral Pieces. This sounded very much as Harvey described it: ‘like an incarnation, the descent into human life.’ Leader Elizabeth Layton did sterling work with several taxing solos, although she was far from alone in this respect. Swarming strings and Messiaenesque chattering woodwind were keen contributors. The second of the three movements – continuous, yet distinct – is an expansion of the work Sprechgesang (for English horn and chamber ensemble). For Harvey, it is ‘concerned with the frenetic chatter of human life in all its expressions of domination, assertion, fear, love, etc.’, which ‘finally moves, exhausted, to mantra and a celebration of ritual language. The mantra is orchestrated and treated by shape vocoding.’ The voices actually put me in mind of an electronic version of Berio’s Sinfonia, which of course has its fair share of ‘frenetic chatter’. Passages of joy were reminiscent once again of Messiaen, who would surely have understood and shared Harvey’s concerns. There were even Romantic ghosts in the machine in the guise of virtuoso piano (splendidly performed by Lynda Cochrane) and languorous woodwind phrases. For the third movement ‘speech has a calmer purpose; it is married to a music of unity, a hymn which is close to Gregorian chant.’ This was certainly apparent, not least in the ominous monodic passages for brass and electronics. The movement built towards a shattering, almost Brucknerian climax, before reverting to some earlier material, taken in different directions, with some further Messiaenesque activity. Divisions between work, performance and audience broke down as the sound enveloped us and took us somewhere beyond, to the transcendent. ‘The paradise of the sounding temple is imagined.’

Varèse’s Poème électronique, for pre-recorded magnetic tape, was composed for Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. (Those were the days!) It was the architect’s insistence, against considerable scepticism from Philips, which ensured that Varèse would be the composer of precisely 480 seconds of music, created second by second from both ‘real’ and purely electronic sounds. (Interestingly, much of the technical design for the pavilion was delegated to Le Corbusier’s assistant, none other than the young Xenakis.) Although the pavilion was demolished, Varèse’s music was preserved and subsequently transferred to computer. The opening bell sounds provided a link with Harvey, but soon we hurtled into an extraordinary futuristic world with a multiplicity of sounds, from organ to heavy industry. At this distance – we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary –there was occasionally something of the Heath Robinson to some of this, but every work, even that of Varèse, must eventually be classicised and take upon itself something of its own time as well as ours. The closing storm-winds set the scene for the déserts of the following, final work.

Here, in Déserts, for fifteen wind instruments, percussion (all ten players once again, including piano), and magnetic tape (1950-54), we were once again awakened by the chiming of bells. An overriding impression from both work and performance would be summed up by the word Boulez had not so long previously used at the head of the seventh of his piano Notations, as yet unpublished: Hiératique. The ghost of Varèse’s own Ionisation was far from lain. Volkov and his instrumentalists were impressively insistent, accomplishing the paradoxical feat of sounding both variegated and monolithic – in fact, rather like the three interpolated passages of ‘organised sound’. All the necessary precision and timbral starkness were there. The electronic sounds are again utterly of the twentieth century – unlike much tamer twentieth-century music – in their evocation of an age of warfare and ‘technological progress’, of deserts both natural and urban, and of what Varèse called ‘this distant inner space where no telescope can reach, where man is alone in a world of mystery and essential solitude’. Gleaming brass was uncompromisingly Corbusier-like, as opposed to the Bauhaus constructivism of some at least of twelve-note Schoenberg; it is interesting, how often one reaches for architectural simile when thinking of Varèse, more often indeed than one does with Xenakis, of whom one might have expected it. This performance marked a fine end to an outstanding concert.

Prom 15: Daniel/BBC SO/Robertson - Beethoven and Carter, 28 July 2008

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Grosse Fuge, Op.133
Carter – Oboe Concerto
Beethoven – Symphony no.5 in C minor, Op.67

Nicholas Daniel (oboe)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson (conductor)

There are doubtless all sorts of connections to be made between Beethoven and Elliott Carter, to my mind the greatest American composer to date. However, I am not so sure that they were really made in this programme, notwithstanding the presence of that most ultra-modernist of Beethoven’s works, the Grosse Fuge. Instead, we had a well balanced if relatively short programme: nothing wrong with that, but it felt like a bit of a missed opportunity when one thinks what one might have chosen to follow the first two items. Perhaps the Fifth Symphony was there to boost the audience; if so, the ploy seemed to have worked, for there were few empty seats.

‘Though intended for string quartet,’ Barry Cooper wrote in his note for the Grosse Fuge, ‘the work can have an even more overwhelming effect when played, as tonight, by orchestral strings.’ I hesitate to disagree with so distinguished a Beethoven scholar, but disagree I do and strongly too. For me, some – though by no means all – of Beethoven’s radicalism is lost when the piece is transferred from a quartet, audibly and visibly straining at the bounds of what is possible, to the plusher sound of an orchestral string section. It is similar to the problem I have with the transcription of Verklärte Nacht; whilst I am happy to hear alternative versions, the real bite remains with the original. A Klemperer perhaps can make me change my mind momentarily when it comes to the Beethoven. However, despite this performance’s virtues, David Robertson is no Klemperer when it comes to Beethoven. The signs were promising: no half-hearted compromise with a chamber-size section, but full Romantic strings; if one is going to do this, one might as well do it properly. Violins were split, which paid off in conveying the echoes, imitations, and contrasts between the two violin parts. There was some beautifully hushed playing in the second of the three principal sections of the work: mysterious yet, unfortunately, also a little mushy. The double basses made a treasurable impact when they were included. And there was, in the final, compound duple section, an encouraging sense of fragmentation, of Beethoven bringing us to the very modern problematic of the unity of the work of art itself. The syncopations were well handled here, which added to the instability. And yet, the performance could have done with more of this throughout. It was good, yet it suffered a little from understatement. Whatever the Grosse Fuge may or should be, understated does not spring to mind.

Carter’s Oboe Concerto was written in 1986-7, shortly before he was eighty, so doubtless qualifies as relatively ‘early’, given the composer’s extraordinary late fecundity. It is written for solo oboe, a concertino group of four violas and percussionist, and orchestra, actually more of a chamber ensemble, comprising flute, clarinet, horn, trombone, two percussionists, and viola-less strings. Written in one continuous stretch, its twenty minutes or so nevertheless comprise something akin to the classical fast-slow-fast three-movement-structure of a concerto. The performers, all of them, did Carter proud. Indeed, it sounded as if this were a repertory piece, in which the players were as much at home as the composer with its modernity: just what a performance of new(-ish) music should be. Nicholas Daniel drew upon considerable twin reserves of musicality and virtuosity and blended them. He did not mask the sometimes extreme demands – the concerto was written for and inspired by Heinz Holliger, no less – but nor did he allow them to become his principal concern. Throughout, as with all of the players, there was sense to be made of the ever-changing and yet ever-present compositional line. Carter’s polyrhythms came across, as they should, although this is no mean feat, as the equivalent of melody in rhythm. Time played its tricks and kept its command, for which Robertson must be apportioned a great deal of credit. Carter’s skills as a colourist were not denied, the percussionist from the concertino group deserving especial mention in this respect. The sense of temporal progress and sonorous transformation as he switched from vibraphone to glockenspiel was an object lesson in rescuing his orchestral section from the charge of being mere purveyors of ‘effects’. But it was with the oboe alone that the concerto so memorably faded into nothingness.

What is one to do with Beethoven’s Fifth, given that most of us will have performances from Furtwängler, Klemperer, the Kleibers, Karajan, Böhm, etc., etc., burned into our memories? Robertson was quoted in the programme as saying, quite correctly, that we have ‘lost all sense of how radical Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony really is’. I wish that he had made it sound more so, for what I heard was a perfectly decent account, better than many of the merely perverse treatments it would receive today, yet never shocking and never truly inspiring. Once again, we had a good-sized orchestra, with sixteen first violins and other strings in proportion. Perhaps this should be partly attributed to the hall’s acoustic, but it rarely sounded as if we had so many. There was once again, I felt, a certain understatement to the performance, which is certainly not a quality for which I seek in this work. The first movement hurried along reasonably eventfully, but the splendidly implacable coda did not really seem to arise from what had gone before. Its true vehemence ought to have been unrelentingly present from the outset. And by vehemence I do not mean the unpleasant blaring we sometimes had to endure, here and during the scherzo, from the horns. The Andante was unquestionably con moto, perhaps a little much so, but there is plenty of room for different interpretations here. When it occasionally sounded too driven, I thought that Robertson overstepped the boundaries, but I suspect that many would have felt differently. He was successful in eliciting a sense of mystery from the orchestra and eventually a fine sense of momentum was built up. The scherzo followed immediately and at quite a breakneck tempo. This just about worked but the same tempo was simply too fast for the trio, in which the ’cellos and double basses sounded breathless. (A certain pay off, arguably, was the sense of connection with the Grosse Fuge.) Second – and rightly, final – time round, the scherzo purveyed an excellent sense of the ghostly, forcing one to listen closely to Beethoven’s still-wondrous scoring.

Unfortunately, mystery was quite absent from the humdrum transition to the finale, when this should sounds as one of the most extraordinary passages in all music. Day broke forth effectively enough, if a little on the fast side once again. However, the orchestra soon sounded somewhat tired. This was less so when repeated. There were some exultant moments in the finale and the piccolo shone as it should, yet there were equally some moments that were faltering or merely nondescript. I speak deliberately of ‘moments’, since the whole never quite added up, nor did it speak of the metaphysical. Karajan once advised Simon Rattle to ‘throw away’ his first hundred Beethoven Fifths, testament to what a difficult work this is to bring off. I have heard worse, much worse, but I have also heard much better, if mostly from great recordings of the past. Sometimes I wonder whether we really know Beethoven at all, although there is always Daniel Barenboim to put me right on that score.