Salzburg Festival (1) - Volodos: Mompou, Liszt, and Scriabin, 18 August 2023

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Mompou: Musica callada, nos 1, 2, 27, 24, 25, 11, 15, 22, 16, 6, 21, 28 

Liszt: Ballade no.2 in B minor, S 171

Scriabin: Études in F-sharp minor, op.8 no.2; in B-flat minor, op.8 no.11; Préludes in E-flat minor, op.11 no.14; in B major, op.16 no.1; in E-flat minor, op.16 no.4; in B major, op.22 no.3; in B-flat minor, op.31 no.1; Deux Poèmes, op.63; En rêvant, op.71 no.2; Flammes sombres, op.73 no.2; Piano Sonata no.10, op.70; Vers la flamme, op.72

Image: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Opportunities are rare to hear the music of Federico Mompou, and from a pianist of the stature of Arcadi Volodos rarer still. My friend and colleague Erik Levi, who also wrote the excellent English-language programme essay for this recital, described Mompou to me as ‘Webern meets Satie’: a good and intriguing starting point. In this selection of twelve pieces from the twenty-eight that make up Musica callada (1959-67), the aphoristic Schoenberg also came to mind, though Mompou’s writing (and Volodos’s performance) tended to suggest brevity rather than aphorism. Melting tone, more forthright as and when necessary, and startling clarity and conviction were key to this performance, each piece seemingly haunted by what had gone before, whilst remaining very much its own utterance. A sense of song, of breath and of breathing too, informed even the more ‘external’ sounds: bells tolling, for instance. All seemed fresh, even provocatively so, every gesture counting. Melodic or not, with Debussy and Liszt often present and occasional appearances by Poulenc in old-French mode, this music will surely have won a good few new converts.

For me, the only real disappointment on the programme was Liszt’s Second Ballade. It began promisingly, Volodos’s colouristic wizardry transferred to a larger stage and scale. Some harmonies sounded strangely familiar, others entirely new. It was, to be sure, aballadic utterance, but where for me it increasingly fell short was in formal command. Volodos clearly has a strong affinity to what we might, with due Romanticism, call the Lisztian soul, but quite why things were happening when they were, what connected them with what had gone and what followed, remained elusive. The audience, though, went wild.

In Volodos’s wide-ranging, almost chronological selection from Scriabin’s piano music, he seemed absolutely at home, assembling and vividly communicating a programme that felt like a vast symphonic poem of its own, developing in technique and harmonic language, yet again strangely consequent on what had gone before. That was true of individual pieces too, from the two Études of 1894-5 onwards, the latter, in B-flat minor, sounding like the perfect love-child of Chopin and Tchaikovsky. Time was bent, yet direction was ever-clear, indeed clearer. Subtlety and detail were second to none, likewise tumult when it came (as often it did). As time passed, and Scriabin’s musical personality darkened and deepened, a sense of proximity to, perhaps even influence from, composers such as Debussy and Schoenberg heightened, Klingsor’s magic garden and its implications very much in the background, though perhaps that says as much about me as the composer (or pianist). This was extraordinarily eloquent and committed advocacy, and in pieces such as the Tenth Piano Sonata, with a formal command beyond question. We were taken not only vers la flamme, but through and beyond it.

’20 Sonatas’ – Stefanovich: Bach, Soler, Scarlatti, CPE Bach, Ives, Bartók, Eisler, Hindemith, Scriabin, Roslavets, Janáček, and Ustvolskaya, 27 February 2022

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Bach: Sonata in A minor, BWV 965, after Reincken
Soler: Sonata in C minor, R.100
Busoni: Sonatina seconda
Scarlatti: Sonata in C minor, Kk.158; Sonata in G major, Kk.13
CPE Bach: Sonata in G minor, Wq.65/17
Ives: Three-Page Sonata

Scarlatti: Sonata in C major, Kk.406
Bartók: Sonata, Sz.80
Scarlatti: Sonata in G minor, Kk.450
Eisler: Sonata no.1, op.1
Soler: Sonata in D-flat major, R.110
Hindemith: Sonata no.3 in B-flat major

Soler: Sonata in G minor
Scriabin: Sonata no.9 in F major, op.68, ‘Black Mass’
Scarlatti: Sonata in G minor, Kk.8
Roslavets: Sonata no.2
Scarlatti: Sonata in B minor, Kk.87
Janáček: Sonata in E-flat minor, 1.X.1905, ‘From the Street’
Ustvolskaya: Sonata no.6

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Twenty piano sonatas over three fifty-minute-long recitals; avoiding the ‘core’ Classical and Romantic (broadly speaking) repertoire, from Haydn to Liszt; asking why composers might time and time again have returned to this genre, if indeed it can be considered the same genre at all. What would you choose? Why? There are no answers, of course, or rather no definitive answers, only an almost infinite host of opportunities. Such is the embarrassment of riches, usually a blessing but just occasionally a curse, of the piano/keyboard repertoire more generally. Tamara Stefanovich’s selection proved typically imaginative, committed, and both spiritually and intellectually nourishing, as well as an outstanding feat of musicianship and pianism.

The first selection began with Bach. (Does not everything?) Here we heard him in the sonata ‘after’ Johann Adam Reincken’s Hortus Musicus trio sonatas: some distance, perhaps, from what we generally think a sonata to be, but perhaps that was part of the point. No one would deny the glories of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, et al., but they can sometimes obscure other paths, especially earlier ones. Stefanovich left us in no doubt that this was a performance for the piano. (If you want to give a harpsichord performance, surely you should do that on the harpsichord.) Voicing gave the sense of a small orchestra at her disposal, a flute answering an oboe, a cello a viola. ‘Ornamentation’ was shown to be melody. There was declamatory joy, a strong sense of harmonic motion, and throughout a vivid, directed performance, culminating in a splendidly ‘present’ Gigue. Antonio Soler offered a very different voice, with both greater pathos and lightness. Stefanovich’s performance drew one in to listen. Busoni’s Sonatina seconda grew out of its close. Restless, diabolical, or better Faustian, it took us to the edge of atonality in a performance of virtuosity entirely at the service of the music, recalling what we know of Busoni's own pianism. Long-range coherence and incident of the moment were two sides of the same coin. 

Domenico Scarlatti made the first of several appearances, with a finely contrasted pair of sonatas (as we often hear his music). The first notes of the C minor Sonata, Kk.158, sounded truly disorienting, emerging as they did from Busoni. Where were we? In a liminal zone, so it seemed, in which eighteenth-century tonality reassembled itself. Both performances seemed thought out from first principles, from individual materials. What joy there was to be had in hearing the second’s repeated notes (more difficult on the piano than they sound). A sonata by CPE Bach, in G minor, followed. Its opening benefited from the grandest, most magnificent opening to a work of his I can recall, rhetoric harnessed as if to the rise of a velvet curtain. The first movement’s fantasia-like swings of mood and material were disciplined, just about, into a whole, yet never too much. This justly lived on the edge. The central Adagio sarabande, still duly involved, nonetheless offered some sense of relief, its arioso quality finely captured. The sheer strangeness (Sturm und Drang, one might call it, I suppose) of the third movement was again relished, never tamed. From one avant-gardist to another, we moved to Charles Ives’s Three-Page Sonata. Strikingly Schoenbergian language—close, not identical, and only for a moment or two—unleashed a parade of restless, radical, and wry freedom, whose chimes were almost the least surprising feature. The vehemence of disciplined chaos to its close made it almost impossible, had I not seen it for myself, to credit that there were only two hands at work here. 

The second recital was announced by Scarlatti: full of incident and pictorial character and contrast. ‘Percussive’ is a word we often hear used to describe Bartók’s piano-writing. One can understand why, but in reality it begs still more questions. (No bad thing.) For here, in his strangely neglected Piano Sonata, there were such profusion of melody, such variegation in the entirely unfussy weighting of each chord, propelled by rhythm and harmony alike, it seemed more than usually inadequate. A relentless first movement paved the way for a second of equal (at least) emotional intensity. The finale was every inch a finale in its substantive release. Rightly, for the first and only time within a recital, the pianist paused for applause. Returning to Scarlatti, it was fascinating to hear his repetitions and other, lighter obstinacies through the shadow cast by Bartók. 

Hanns Eisler’s opus one brought us fascinatingly close in its first movement to the language of the serial Schoenberg, yet held its distance too: more skittish, Scarlatti an excellent preface. Structure on paper became living form in liquid performance. Prokofiev seemed close at times too, perhaps particularly in the second of the three movements, its line unerringly traced and projected. The care and abandon with which not un-Schoenbergian idiosyncrasies were integrated in the finale typified the performance as a whole. Following an unexpectedly fragrant ornamental flowering from Soler, its harmonies taking a while to get used to after Eisler, we moved to Hindemith’s Third Piano Sonata. In its first movement, siciliano rhythms immediately standing out, they sounded as if formed by their surrounding harmonies. A scampering scherzo and two deliberate yet purposeful movements to follow led us to a sense of hard-won victory. 

Soler opened the third and final instalment: courtly yet capricious, ornamentation speaking of a freedom of which we stand in greater need than ever. Scriabin’s ‘Black Mass’ Sonata suggested dissolution as another, more dangerous form of emancipation, even through the burning fire of Bakunin-like anarchism (very different from Ives’s). There was wayward alchemy, though, and direction to be appreciated looking backwards from where we had come, even if we were uncertain at the time where we were heading. Command of detail was crucial to that greater sweep, just as it was in the dignified pathos of the Scarlatti sonata that followed. The post-Romantic constructivism of Ukrainian Nikolai Roslavets took a different path from Eisler (or Schoenberg) yet could nonetheless be felt as something of an antidote to Scriabin. There were moments of languor, yes, but motivic construction and transformation won out. Once more, the strangeness in context of Scarlatti’s harmonies was to be relished as a pendant.

Janáček’s Sonata, 1.X.1905 could hardly fail to have particular resonance given the state of the world around us. It went beyond that, though, in a moving performance of proud dignity and deeply communicative humanism, fusing the subtle and the direct. Its second movement was more songful, yet no less impassioned, through rather than despite its fragile nerve endings. For the final work of the day, Stefanovich donned black gloves to tackle the immediate yet reflective violence of Galina Ustvolskaya’s 1988 Sonata no.6. More unremitting than Bartók, blacker than anything we had yet heard or wished to hear, it duly bludgeoned, yet spoke of and with an integrity that refused to offer easy answers. Was there, perhaps, a glimmer of hope in there somewhere? It was probably something more equivocal than that. And then it was gone.

LPO/Canellakis - Boulanger, Wagner, and Scriabin, 22 January 2022

Royal Festival Hall

Lili Boulanger: D’un soir triste
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I and ‘Liebestod’
Scriabin: Symphony no.4, op.54, ‘Poem of Ecstasy’

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Karina Canellakis (conductor)

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor Karina Canellakis, (c) Benjamin Ealovega

Disappointment was palpable when a pre-concert announcement informed us of a change to the programme. Ravel’s Left-Hand Piano Concerto would no longer be played, Cédric Tiberghien having been indisposed at very short notice. All of two hours, I learned later, had made it impossible to find a substitute or indeed to offer an alternative work, and the pianist was understandably frustrated by the experience. Wagner, initially slated to preface the Ravel, now came second, Lili Boulanger’s D’un soir triste moving to the first half. Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy remained last, but now with the second half to itself. It may not have been the programme anybody wanted, but it received an excellent, in many ways outstanding, set of performances from the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Karina Canellakis. As ever right now, we gratefully made the best of a less than ideal situation. 

D’un soir triste proved something of a revelation to me. I do not think I had heard it before; if I had, it cannot have been in a performance as impressive as this. Its opening reminded me, perhaps oddly, of Puccini’s Il tabarro: above all in the marriage of particular, dark orchestral colouring to other aspects of Boulanger’s writing (harmony and rhythm). It was built otherwise, quite otherwise, although that impression returned at the end of a finely turned symphonic poem (both as work and performance). Debussyan and Wagnerian roots were unmistakeable, but only a small part of a more richly post-Romantic canvas. On occasion, I fancied there might even be a little of something more Expressionist, giving a piece such as Schreker’s Vorspiel zu einen Drama a run for its money. Although ardent, indeed passionate, this remained far from the hothouse. The abiding impression was clean yet dark, with a keen sense of narrative, propelled by excellent wind and later strong solos. There was decided unease too, evoked as much through timbre (pizzicato, for instance) as harmony. A powerful, yet ambiguous climax was just as well traced as its preparation and aftermath. Fascinating. 

The intensity of the opening to the Prelude to Act I of Tristan was welcome enough; still more so were Canellakis’s unerring pacing and the LPO’s depth of tone and, later, fine orchestral balance. There was unfussy variegation too: chiaroscuro that never drew attention to itself, never seemed present for its own sake. Again, Canellakis built the music to a splendid climax, its trumpets already presaging Scriabin. There was true Wagnerian melos here—and this from someone far from unexacting when it comes to Wagner. The so-called ‘Liebestod’ (properly ‘Isoldes Verklärung’) does not belong tonally with the Prelude, but an excellent performance such as this can allay such qualms. This was an alert, comprehending performance, which might perhaps have had greater breadth, but did not drag. Crucially, it glowed. On this evidence, Canellakis may turn out to be a Wagnerian to be reckoned with. The LPO’s recent experience with Wagner at Glyndebourne could not have been put to better use. 

Scriabin’s Poem had many of the same virtues, albeit, quite rightly, with greater languor. Again, Canellakis offered a poised, clear account, as well balanced as it was well directed. She is evidently a conductor who has music flow without ever making the experience about her. One inevitably heard fragments of Tristan throughout, yet as a springboard, not a cage. In this work, journey and frustrations are surely more the thing than arrival. There was assuredly no doubting the sexual charge of its ebb and flow. Climaxes can hardly be subtle, nor is there much point in trying to make them so; they made their point in vivid, enjoyable fashion. To hear a full orchestra at something close to its best in so fine a performance was magnificent reward. As for the rest, one can but admire Wagner’s economy.

LSO/Roth and others - Lang, Manoury, Shin, and Scriabin, 24 March 2019

Barbican foyers and Barbican Hall

David Lang: the public domain (UK premiere)

Philippe Manoury: Ring (UK premiere)

Donghoon Shin: Kafka’s Dream (world premiere)

Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstasy, op.54

London Symphony Chorus

LSO Community Choir

500 Voices Participants

Simon Halsey (chorus director)

Esmerelda Conde-Ruiz, Emily Dickens, Lucy Griffiths, David Lawrence, Jack Apperley (conductors)

London Symphony Orchestra

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

An excellent concert from the LSO and François-Xavier Roth, prefaced by a more aesthetically dubious enterprise: the UK premiere of David Lang’s the public domain. Let us get that out of the way first. The work, if we can call it that, is designed, according to the composer, ‘for the entire community we live in, so it doesn’t require music professionals, although they are welcome. Performers and audience should be indistinguishable from each other.’ And so on and so forth. Immersive music theatre, however, this was not. What ensued consisted of choruses stationed across the Barbican foyers, shouting and sometimes singing platitudes to music that was, if anything, still more banal. Lang ‘crowdsourced the texts’; they are ‘internet search engine auto-completions of the sentence, “One thing we all have is our…”.’ Alas, he did not use all of them, removing ‘those that referred to specific people, that insulted or praised a person or group, that said anything – good or bad – about a particular religion or nationality or gender … that were pornographic.’ So pretty much anything that might have been of interest, then. Still, even ‘our design/our need/our capacity to choose how we will view the world around us,’ etc., etc., etc. seemed like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit when compared to the banal chords of Lang’s score. One might point to a spatial element, I suppose, but that would be rather like saying Stockhausen’s Gruppen is like a car park, because people park their cars in different places in that car park. Perhaps there is something more to be said of it, but I shall leave it there. I am sure many of those involved in singing enjoyed the three-quarters of an hour or so it took to get through the twelve parts of whatever it was that was alleged to be going on, and that that was doubtless much of the point. For the audience, though, the motivation to ‘be indistinguishable from each other’ could hardly have stood further from realisation. At least there was opportunity to repair to the bar and continue to try to make something of it with a gin and tonic in hand.

What a relief, then, to enter the Barbican Hall, suitably refreshed, and to hear a performance underway: a performance underway that may or may not have been a ‘real’ performance, depending on one’s standpoint. Here, in another UK premiere, that of Philippe Manoury’s 2013 Ring, there was genuine play both with space and with the bounds of a work and performance, genuine play within a work that enticed and, in an intriguing sense, left one wondering whether this, despite its scale, had been a mere fragment of a greater whole. Music, whatever we mean by that, had certainly begun when we entered the hall. The idea of a notated tuning-up is not new, but what is? This welcomed us not only into the hall, but into the work and its realisation, musicians encircling the audience, forming that ‘ring’ of the title, music coalescing as it had never done in the previous work. When the conductor arrived and began, there was no discernible difference to start with, but rather a visual staging post in still liminal transition, in which occasional strands sounded not unlike snatches of Boulez’s Répons, without ever being reduced to them or displaying undue – or even due – ‘influence’. Was spatial differentiation in itself a form of melody, analogous to timbre in Klangfarbenmelodie? It seemed to be; or rather, might well have been understood as such. Listening and interpretation were open, without being arbitrary. Sounds – music – swirled around us, leading to climaxes as one might traditionally have understood them, and indeed as we should later hear in Scriabin. Material was ever transforming, though never, so it seemed, complete as the aspirant ‘ring’. Sometimes one, or at least I, heard the same figure as more concerned with its repeated pitch, sometimes with rhythm, sometimes with timbre – whilst still, apparently, being the same. Structure was abundantly clear, again not entirely unlike a symphonic work, yet dynamic as form, not entirely unlike a comprehending performance of a symphonic work. For this was a performance from the LSO and Roth in a strong sense. Whatever the theatre, this was music ultimately concerned with ‘itself’.

The world premiere of Donghoon Shin’s Kafka’s Dream followed, its inspiration Jorge Luis Borge’s 1975 poem, Ein Traum, providing a clue even in its title of dreamlike blurring of lines between the imaginary and reality: in itself a connection of sorts between Manoury and Scriabin. For there was a nice doubling of tripartite structure, the two previous parts combined in unexpected, surprising ways, a dream within a dream. Throughout, we heard a keen air for orchestration and for memory, lively rhythms, for instance, ‘remembered’, yet not quite. Thematic development, or something akin to it, was, again as in both preceding and succeeding works, both clearly and dramatically communicated, a solitary unease at its heart, without that necessarily being its point. Shin clearly enjoyed writing for a large orchestra; I enjoyed hearing him do so.

Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy benefited from admirable clarity and a fine balance between the vertical and horizontal. That balance, after all, is surely integral to the work itself; it does not necessarily follow, however, that that is how we always hear it. As in the preceding orchestral works, Roth and the LSO realised structure dynamically as form, here perhaps informed by a Debussyan ear, not least for Allemondian malevolence. A performance that evaded the hothouse entirely would miss the point. This certainly did not, yet there was far more to it than that: a variegation one may well have considered botanical. Climaxes drew lines together: Strauss or Mahler, rather than a Bruckner monolith. I am not a synaesthete, but I fancied that I moved a little closer here, however illusory that sentiment.

Prom 43: Batiashvili/Dreisig/WEDO/Barenboim - Tchaikovsky, Coleman, and Scriabin, 14 August 2018

Royal Albert Hall

 
Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin, op.24: Polonaise
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D major, op.35
David Robert Coleman: Looking for Palestine (2017-18)
Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstasy, op.54

Elsa Dreisig (soprano)

Lisa Batiashvili (violin)

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Can music lie? Conversely, can it tell the truth? Are those meaningless questions, confusions of category? Most of us, I think, would agree that music can mislead and that it can also lay claim to truth content. It was certainly a relief to spend a couple of hours away from the lies that infest our political and ‘media’ life, to experience the truthfulness of great musicianship.

 

A late addition to the printed programme was the Polonaise from Eugene Onegin. It made for just as splendid an overture as it might have done an encore. Daniel Barenboim has a splendid history with this opera and with Tchaikovsky more generally. With his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra too I heard perhaps the best live performance I have yet to experience of the Sixth Symphony. Moreover, the first time I heard the orchestra live, at the LRB’s Edward Said Memorial Concert in 2004, the Fifth was on the programme. Here heard – almost saw – the swagger of St Petersburg: for once with an unashamedly large, generous orchestra. There was seductive intimacy too: those stolen glances, aural and almost visual, telling us much. And those cellos…

 

The Violin Concerto took off, so it seemed, from where the Polonaise had left us: stylistically, even developmentally, there was much in common, yet also of course much to distinguish. Barenboim provided an almost Beethovenian sense of purpose to take us up to Lisa Batiashvili’s entry. Her tone struck me throughout as akin to a fine red Burgundy: rich yet never too full-bodied, cultivated, always hitting the spot – and the dead centre of the notes, single – or double-stopped, without so much as a hint of the clinical. Rubato was perfectly judged as a tool of expression, as were Barenboim’s variations of tempo. The cadenza might have been written, as well as performed, ‘in real time’, such was the sense, however illusory, of spontaneity. Freshness of woodwind solos was just as striking, each and every one of them revealing a star in the best, collegiate sense. Likewise in the Canzonetta, in which Batiashvili’s duetting with them proved the magical highlight of highlights, and the finale. Even in a performance such as this, I cannot say that Tchaikovsky’s invention, or lack thereof, quite convinces. There is surely a good deal of note-spinning. It came closer than I can recall, though, and this was exquisite spinning of notes, with all the character of a great finale.

 

David Robert Coleman’s Looking for Palestine sets passages from Najla Said’s – that is Edward’s daughter’s – one-woman play Palestine. First she bears witness to the vicious Israeli onslaught upon Lebanon in 2006 – vigorously supported, you may remember, by Tony Blair and New Labour. ‘You can spend your life being a humanist, a pacifist … treating them the same way you wish to be treated BUT when you are being attacked, when bombs are falling … your life is in danger and you are scared, it is so easy to look up at the sky and scream at the top of your lungs’. Later, in New York City, she discovers a group protesting for Palestinian rights – her rights – without being able to contribute: ‘ME, I am this Palestinian walking by them all with my mouth slightly open, because I want to do, say, give, something, SOMETHING, and I’m thinking how I can’t, and shouldn’t at that what WOULD I do, say? And I’m thinking that words are so powerful, Palestine … Palestine … that word … that word … that word …’

 

Words are indeed powerful, as is music; so too is their combination. Here, the oud sets up the musical setting – and, in a sense, the words to come too. Its intervals, in the solo introduction, seem generative, leading to more non-verbal speech – or is it? is that to render things too easy, to sentimentalise? – from the fine WEDO brass section. As well as the oud, piano, harps, percussion seem to incite the rest of the orchestra – perhaps to look for Palestine too. The soprano’s introduction in turn – ‘And though I have never returned to Palestine, Palestine always returns to me. Tuesday, July eleventh, I am in Beirut.’ – incites both action and remembrance. (Remembrance, we may reflect, is sometimes all we have, for better or worse.) Coleman’s setting here, Elsa Dreisig complemented, perhaps even questioned by, electronics, came closer to Nono than anything I had yet heard Barenboim conduct. It would be quite a thing were he to take up those particular cudgels now from his erstwhile friend and colleague, Claudio Abbado. Like Nono, Coleman, in the three short ‘scenes’ that follow, evinces a keen sense of that ineffable thing we call ‘vocal style’. It may or may not correspond to anything we have heard before; yet, even if we cannot explain it, we know it – at least in a fine performance, which this certainly seemed to be. There was, perhaps, also a sense of post-Bergian writing for voice and orchestra – certainly harmony – as the first scene went on. Amplified speech at the opening of the second came across as reimagined recitative. Was there a bit of the easy film score towards its close? Perhaps, but one might well argue that the words suggest such an approach.

 

An amplified ‘stage whisper’, in the introduction to the third scene – ‘I think’ – called into question even the identity Said/Dreisig had established for herself, post 9/11, as an ‘Arab bridging the gap between two worlds that don’t understand each other’. Ligetian scurrying and swarming, a whip that – if only to me – evoked Alberich in Nibelheim, traffic whistles: all this and more went to suggest the aural urban landscape of Manhattan, even what Nono would have called his ‘provocation’. Was the final, vaguely ‘Arabic’ vocal line a sign or an indictment of Orientalism? That such a question, clearly presented, was left hanging was perhaps the most telling aspect of all.

 

Finally, at least on the programme, came Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. Barenboim and his orchestra proved once again very much in their element. Work and performance opened somewhere between Wagner and Debussy, and immediately headed somewhere beyond them – whatever one thinks of that particular ‘beyond’. Yes, I thought, he ‘gets’ Scriabin. An urgent, undeniably hot-house performance, founded on rhythmic progression and above all on the progression of harmonic rhythm, seemed in just the right sense to ‘go with the flow’, or better, to ride the crest of these strange, even gaudy aural waves. Until languor set in, that is, and how, Michael Barenboim’s sweet toned violin solos very much the icing on that particular cake. Overloading with metaphors seems inevitable here, even in stylistic keeping. Immediacy of colour, initial Tannhäuser-like frustration of climax, trumpets and brass more general with old-fashioned ‘Russian’ vibrato, all led us up to a series of final climaxes which may or may not be ludicrous – but which are surely what Scriabin ‘meant’.

 

After that, the unforced nobility of a generous ‘Nimrod’ spoke more clearly and, yes, more truthfully than any words could. Now it was over to us, but would Elgar’s countrymen listen?

Prom 28 - Power/BBC SO/Knussen - Dukas, Turnage, Schuller, and Scriabin, 6 August 2015

Royal Albert Hall

Dukas – L’Apprenti sorcier

Turnage – On Opened Ground
Schuller – Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee
Scriabin – The Poem of Ecstasy

Lawence Power (viola)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Oliver Knussen (conductor)

 

Try as I might, I could not discern a common theme or line to this programme, although there were certain connections to be made between some of the pieces. No matter: it opened my ears to two new works (new both to me and to the Proms), and was all very well performed.

 

Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not heard so often as one might expect. I am not sure I have heard it sound so hard-edged before; ideas of something childish or even childlike were banished on no uncertain terms. Oliver Knussen’s reading began quite deliberately, the opening offering a languor that perhaps drew it a little closer to Debussy. It was full of expectation too, before taking an angular course, which yet remained rather jolly. A strong sense of narrative was imparted throughout, without detracting from the musical substance.

 

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s On Opened Ground was commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra for Yuri Bashmet; Lawrence Power, who gave the British premiere in 2004, joined the BBC Symphony Orchestra for its first Proms performance. The first movement, ‘Cadenza and Scherzino’, gently upsets preconceived notions of ordering. More important than that, its subtle opening, with quiet accompaniment – had I not known otherwise, its hinting at refractions of the viola might have had me thinking of electronics – captivates, draws one in to an absorbing exploration of the viola and its potential relationships with the symphony orchestra.  Later, the ‘Scherzino’ section dances, hints at post-Bergian blues – Berg’s Violin Concerto more than once came to mind – and, above all, sings in a voice that is recognisably Turnage’s. The stillness of the close proved magical: testament to a fine performance as well as mastery of orchestration. The second of the two movements, ‘Interrupted Song and Chaconne’, begins in rapt fashion I am tempted to call ‘pastoral’ or at least ‘elegiac’. There develops some sense of conflict between soloist and orchestra, as if the latter is determined to thwart the former, but Turnage’s keen sense of drama permits another way, resolving itself through the working out of a chaconne: at times Big Band-ish, at others, frankly Romantic, its Romanticism seemingly arising from the material rather than the easy option beloved of so many neo-tonal composers. I have not always responded warmly to Turnage’s work, but certainly did so on this occasion.

 

The other Proms premiere was of Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee: suite-like, and full of incident, often quietly surprising. The opening ‘Antique Harmonies’,  hieratic orchestrally as well as harmonically, prepared the way for a delightfully quirky, even capricious ‘Abstract Trio’, played only by three instruments at any one time. ‘Little Blue Devil’ offered a possible connection with Turnage and jazz: very much at home rather than depicting or imitating. ‘The Twittering Machine’, by contrast, seemed to move between other, quite different, 1950s style: a journey, one might say, from swarming to pointillism; or, alternatively, a hint of early Stockhausen (or is it perhaps amused by him?) with a dash of Amériques-like material (albeit with far more sparing use of the orchestra). Flute arabesques from the Gallery, soon joined by other instruments in counterpoint, were the abiding memory of the curiously Orientalist ‘Arab Village’. ‘An Eerie Moment’ is more than a little suggestive of various movements from Schoenberg’s op.16 Five Orchestral Pieces, the contrast with the concluding ‘Pastorale’ perhaps the greatest of all. Klee-like? I am not sure; perhaps I am too wedded to the idea of Webern as the musical manifestation of Klee. But that is neither here nor there, really; I should happily hear more where this came from.

 

Finally, The Poem of Ecstasy. I cannot really take the piece seriously, although many musicians I greatly admire, Knussen amongst them, clearly do. Such music, even if one discounts the composer’s megalomania, tends to have me reflect how economical Wagner is with his climaxes. Scriabin’s meandering is clearly deliberate, but I am never entirely sure to what end. Knussen and the BBC SO nevertheless offered an enjoyable, wholehearted performance, opening with luscious, vibrato-laden languor (a possible connection with the opening of the Dukas?) Although Scriabin’s climaxes come thick and fast, Knussen shaped them with great skill, in as lucid a reading as I can recall. There was some wonderfully evocative afterglow to be experienced, and it is always a joy to hear the Albert Hall organ. Those bells, though…?

Garrick Ohlsson - Scriabin, 6 January 2015

Wigmore Hall

Prelude in A minor, op.11 no.2

Piano Sonata no.2 in G-sharp minor, op.19
Etude in B-flat minor, op.8 no.11
Etude in D-flat major, op.8 no.10
Piano Sonata no.4 in F-sharp major, op.30
Piano Sonata no.7 in F-sharp major, op.64, ‘White Mass’
Désir, op.57 no.1
Piano Sonata no.6 in G major, op.62
Etude in D-flat major, op.42 no.1
Etude in C-sharp major, op.42 no.5
Fragilité, op.51 no.1
Piano Sonata no.5 in F-sharp major, op.53
 

2015 is the centenary of Scriabin’s death; Twelfth Night, on which this Wigmore Hall recital took place, was also his birthday. There could be little gainsaying Garrick Ohlsson’s achievement in the performance of these piano works, but I am afraid I was less than convinced of their stature as a whole, the White Mass Sonata for me certainly the highlight. It is perhaps a cheap point to say that Scriabin’s downright ludicrous ambitions were never achieved; how could they be? Take the never-finished – how could it have been? – Mysterium, which in the words of Geoffrey Norris’s programme note, ‘was to start with bells hung from clouds over the Himalayas and to end with the dawn of humanity on a higher plane of enlightenment’. I am not sure, however, that many of the piano pieces even successfully fulfil more modest expectations. That surprised me, givn a remark I recalled from Pierre Boulez, who said, when conducting some of Scriabin’s music, that he found the piano music more interesting. I suppose it depends which piano music; at its best, I should agree, but otherwise, I should unhesitatingly prefer to hear The Poem of Ecstasy.

The opening Prelude in A minor was promising enough, Chopin’s example strong in both work and Ohlsson’s performance. (Throughout, I was reminded of his experience as a Chopin pianist.) The Second Sonata – I find it difficult to understand in what sense any of the pieces called ‘sonata’ have anything much to do with sonata principles – offered admirably delicate playing, but proved one of the works at which I found myself most at a loss as to what it amounted to in compositional terms. I wondered whether Ohlsson might have made more of the contrast between the two movements, but am perfectly willing to allow that any fault may have lain with the work itself. Of the two following Etudes, the D-flat major work offered welcome brightness of contrast, amidst the minor-ish mode meandering previously heard. But it was with the F-sharp major Sonata (no.4), that we encountered what was, at least to my ears, a more interesting work, much more interesting. Salon aspects seemed to have disappeared from Scriabin’s writings, and the melodic material sounded far more appropriate to the harmonies. It would be difficult, though, to argue that, even as a short ‘sonata’, it lacked longueurs. The White Mass Sonata, which concluded the first half, offered a more succinct example of Scriabin’s ‘ecstatic’ style, the weird would-be apotheosis of its conclusion a challenge both in work and in performance.

Désir, with which the second half opened, offered attractive, post-Tristan harmonies, seeming to hint at the Poem of Ecstasy, whilst retaining the welcome virtue of smaller form and genre. The impression Ohlsson gave was of something not wholly unlike late Liszt. His programming here made a great deal of sense, the Sixth Sonata seeming to grow out of its melodies and harmonies, although the sonata undoubtedly voiced darker moods. Ohlsson retained the somewhat paradoxical improvisatory quality the music appears to demand, or at least to encourage. That said, I found the piece again rather outstayed its welcome. The D-flat major Etude sounded more like an Etude than its predecessors. Once again, the point of departure in Chopin was readily discernible. Likewise the C-sharp minor Etude which followed, the twist of tonality a welcome feature. Fragilité rehashes the harmonies of Désir a little too obviously for my liking, but Ohlsson certainly rehashed them well. Finally, there came the Fifth Sonata (and three Scriabin encores!) Perhaps I was just too tired of Scriabin by then, but I struggled to discern the work’s form, and I have no reason to think that was owed to the performance. Might the composer perhaps have benefited from an editor?  

Matsuev/LSO/Gergiev - Scriabin and Liszt, 30 March 2014

Barbican Hall

Scriabin – Symphony no.1 in E major, op.26

Liszt – Piano Concerto no.2 in A major, S 125
Scriabin – Symphony no.4, The Poem of Ecstasy, op.54

Ekaterina Sergeyeva (mezzo-soprano)

Alexander Timchenko (tenor)

Denis Matsuev (piano)

London Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Simon Halsey)

London Symphony Orchestra

Valery Gergiev (conductor)

 

It is not every day one hears Scriabin’s First Symphony, and that is no bad thing. Valery Gergiev’s exhumation with the LSO was not without interest, but ultimately it is at best a mediocre piece, which long outstays its welcome. That said, the occasional opportunity to hear such a work – Gergiev is performing all of Scriabin’s symphonies with the LSO – is worth taking, even if the performance were not on the level of, say, Riccardo Muti’s Philadelphia recording. The first movement was properly languorous – an almost unavoidable word here – and, yes, ‘perfumed’. It meandered along its way, but one could take solace, not for the last time, in a beautifully-played violin solo from Roman Simovic. Wagnerisms one could spot in isolation, but they lacked the Master’s direction or development. Wagner and late-ish Romanticism made their mark again in the second movement. One sensed that Gergiev might have traced a clearer path, had his head not been so often buried in the score, though by the same token, whatever might have seemed to be the case, it was not his first encounter with the work. That said, awkwardness and novelty, even a degree of originality, came through. But there was nothing here to counter Pierre Boulez’s claim that the most interesting Scriabin lies in his piano music. The third movement glowed and swelled: more like a warm bath than anything more invigorating, but no matter. Brahms, however, this certainly is not. There is perhaps something more traditionally ‘Russian’, even reminiscent of Tchaikovsky (bad Tchaikovsky, though) to the writing of the scherzo. Rhythms were nicely sprung, and a familiar vein of (quasi-)orientalist fantasy was mined to pleasing enough effect. Ridiculous applause marred the pause before the fifth movement, as the soloists walked on. They proved excellent in the finale, Ekaterina Sergeyeva splendidly rich-toned and centred, Alexander Timchenko ardent, tending even toward the ecstatic. Beautiful wind solos, shimmering violins, brass as resplendent as the voices: Gergiev’s forces gave this paean to art a committed performance, the conductor clearly far better suited to Scriabin than, say, to Mahler. The fugal writing still sounded forced, the ending ultimately oddly conventional, but that was not the fault of the performers. It was a pity, especially in what must to most have been an unfamiliar work, that Andrew Huth’s booklet note should have said so little about the music and nothing at all in any detail; there were plenty of words available, but alas they were not well chosen.

 

Liszt came as a great relief following the interval, all the more so given the excellence of Denis Matsuev’s performance, well supported by Gergiev and the LSO. The opening was taken quicker than usual, as would be the following, thunderous despatch of the Allegro agitato assai section, but both tempi convinced. Matsuev offered from the start a classically Romantic Steinway tone, awe-inspiring in its clarity and its depth; I am almost tempted to use the word ‘glamorous’. One can imagine this going down a treat in Rachmaninov, and if there have perhaps been more searching interpretations, this nevertheless thrilled – not a quality to be taken for granted. Matsuev’s piano-cello duet with Tim Hugh offered a delectable example of the chamber music the composer is erroneously claimed rarely, or even never, to have written; like Wagner, Liszt’s tendency, though not an exclusive one, is to incorporate chamber music into works for larger forces. (Consider how much even of Götterdämmerung may be considered in that light.) The LSO’s woodwind here and elsewhere offered mellifluous support. If the vulgarity of the march transformation was relished rather than mitigated, that is a perfectly reasonable response. And if glissandi may not quite have scintillated as they did with Richter, they were still mightily impressive.

 

In The Poem of Ecstasy, Gergiev’s habitual moulding was for once not out of place; in a sense, the more narcissistic the better here. (Not quite true, I know, but anyway…) But there was purpose too, amidst the sultry languor. Playing, whether solo or tutti, was exquisite. A welcome air of Debussy stopped one suffocating entirely, but one almost welcomed the prospect of such suffocation. Strings were voluptuous, and the LSO brass excelled itself, not least in Philip Cobb’s excellent, vibrato-laden solos, as ‘Russian’ a sound as one is likely to hear from a non-Russian orchestra. The orchestra veritably shuddered, coming close to explosion. A real organ would have been welcome, but its lack is one of the prices one pays for performances in the Barbican. Nevertheless, this remained an excellent performance, one most likely to be welcomed on CD before long.

Teztlaff/LSO/Eötvös - Debussy, Szymanowski, and Scriabin, 29 April 2012

Barbican Hall

Debussy – Nocturnes
Szymanowski – Violin Concerto no.1
Scriabin – The Poem of Ecstasy

Christian Teztlaff (violin)
Ladies of the London Symphony Chorus
London Symphony Orchestra
Péter Eötvös (conductor)


It was inevitable that the shadow of Pierre Boulez would fall at least a little over this concert, the first of two from which he had to withdraw owing to ill health. Nevertheless, Péter Eötvös, who has taken over two demanding and highly individual programmes without alteration, made them his own to a remarkable extent; or, to put it another way, so as not to suggest self-aggrandisement, he ensured that the listener’s attention was focused upon the music rather than the performers. One of the many aspects of Boulez’s genius has been that for revealing programming, and so it was here, even in absentia. I should therefore dissent from Kathryn McDowell’s description in the programme booklet of the concert as an ‘eclectic 20th-century programme,’ quite apart from the dating of Debussy’s Nocturnes, completed in 1899.

One would perhaps have to return to the likes of Roger Désormière to find a conductor more strongly associated with the music of Debussy than Boulez, and though Eötvös’s performance had its virtues, it also had its slight disappointments. The direct approach adopted from the opening of ‘Nuages’ intrigued, the LSO woodwind almost Classical in character, but strings added mystery upon their entry, putting me in mind of Pelléas. Impressively, the string sound was recognisably ‘Gallic’; I could not help but think that even Désormière would have recognised it as such. Eötvös contributed a compelling sense of line, which, fused with his ear for detail, imparted an impressive sense of something that approaching (wordless) narrative. At times, I thought of Bartók’s ballet, The Wooden Prince, as well, of course, as Liszt’s Nuages gris, greatly admired by Debussy, and the composer’s own Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. ‘Fêtes’ was lively but often somewhat brash, rather as I imagine it might have done under Sir Georg Solti. (I know that he recorded Images, but I have not heard the results.) However, what the performance lacked in refinement, it partly made up in rhythmic certainty. ‘Sirènes’ was again direct in approach, and again benefited from an impressive sense of continuity. Despite a fine contribution from the ladies of the London Symphony Chorus, there have, however, been performances more seductively conceived.

Christian Tetzlaff joined the orchestra for a triumphant performance of Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto, as much the orchestra’s show as his, as was announced by the opening, teeming with life and exhibiting a veritable kaleidoscope of colour, answered by a sinuous, beguiling, and unquestionably seductive violin entry. The performance as a whole was highly dramatic, Eötvös and Teztlaff alike ensuring that there was never even the slightest hint that Szymanowski’s golden thread might snap. One felt enveloped, and gorgeously so, yet also in sure hands with respect to direction. The contrast with a recent performance of the composer’s Third Symphony from Vladimir Jurowski was in that respect pronounced. Szymanowski’s originality concerning form spoke for and created itself – clearly and evocatively. And what a glorious wash of sound the LSO could produce, contrasting with Teztlaff’s silver and gold, a contrast lying at the heart of a remarkable performance. Not that that should be taken to imply that Teztlaff’s performance lacked spellbinding and impassioned virtuosity, for it did not; however, the work sounded so much more than a ‘late Romantic’ concerto, if indeed, which I doubt, that soubriquet retains much validity at all. Quite why some of the violin concertos appearing with wearying frequency on concert programmes are preferred to this I truly cannot imagine. At any rate, this must surely have garnered both work and composer a new host of converts. Teztlaff treated the audience to an encore: the ‘Melodia’ from Bartok’s solo violin sonata. His command of line and expressive commitment, especially in terms of hushed intimacy, clearly drew in the audience, for, as Gareth Davies (@flutelicious), the LSO’s principal flautist, tweeted to me during the interval, this was a rendition miraculously free of coughing.

Boulez clearly entertains a degree of ambivalence towards Scriabin; frankly, it would be a strange sort of person who did not. He has spoken of a general preference for the more exploratory piano music, yet has also recorded some of the orchestral works, The Poem of Ecstasy twice in fact. The virtues of our absent guest’s programming were revealed as the opening bars’ sonorities suggested a placing of our composer somewhere between Debussy and Szymanowski. Adam Walker’s excellent flute playing should definitely be accorded a mention, ranging ably from the languorous to the sprightly. Wagnerisms, especially Tristanisms, were attended to, whether in terms of highlighting kinship of material, or more importantly, in the expression of the frustration at inability to climax. (Tannhäuser is surely also an influence, or at least a precedent, here. Perhaps Strauss is too.) What unsympathetic listeners – and performances – might suggest to be mere bombast or indeed mere languor, was granted as true a sense of dramatic justification as one might hope for. Decadent it certainly was – how could it not be? – and so it was down to the last arabesque; yet, even if the music is less ‘progressive’ than some of Scriabin’s piano writing, and even if it is too much of a good, or more likely a bad, thing, I was more than happy to indulge. Should one have felt a little dirty at the end? Perhaps, but even Boulez cannot live by Webern alone.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard: Liszt, Wagner, Berg, and Scriabin, 7 December 2011

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Liszt – La lugubre gondola I, S 200
Wagner – Piano Sonata in A-flat major, ‘Für das Album von Frau MW’
Liszt – Nuages gris, S 199
Berg – Piano Sonata, op.1
Liszt – Unstern! sinister, disastro, S 208
Scriabin – Piano Sonata no.9 in F major, op.68, ‘Black Mass’
Liszt – Piano Sonata in B minor, S 178

The second of Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s International Piano Series recitals continued his focus on Liszt. Whereas the first had arguably offered more varied fare, relatively earlier works combined with music by Bartók, Marco Stroppa, Ravel, and Messiaen, here, at least in the first half, was late Liszt with a vengeance. An uncompromising programme paired three of his extraordinary late elegies with Wagner, Berg, and Scriabin. Even the B minor sonata, the single work performed in the second half, took on a later tinge than one might have expected, partly by dint of Aimard’s programming, and partly on account of his performance.

The recital opened with the first version of La lugubre gondola. (Not the second version, as stated in Harriet Smith’s often bizarre programme notes, which veered between Woman’s Own – ‘We cannot be sure how far their relationship went, but Wagner was clearly out to impress Mathilde’ – and Blue Peter: ‘Listen to the opening of this sonata, forgetting about the rhythm for a moment. Does that melodic shape recall anything?’) Liszt’s barcarolle rhythm was clear and profoundly generative in Aimard’s performance: if the Venetian equivalent of sea-sickness is river-sickness, than that is what one felt, the Nietzschean décadence of the Wagners’ Palazzo Vendramin oppressively apparent. Thomas Mann – more so than Visconti – was never far away. Aimard conveyed a fine sense of the forcibly subdued, or even subjugated: something was trying to break free from whatever was stifling it – and us. Wagner’s ‘Album’ Sonata for Mathilde Wesendonck followed. It is a grossly underrated work: just because it is not Liszt’s sonata does not mean that it is not worth performing. Aimard offered as fine a performance as I have heard: tempi well-nigh ideal and fluid as required. Even if the piano-writing is not Liszt’s, some of the sonorities are – and the same might be said of Beethoven, both in placing of chords and even some melodic characteristics. Aimard brought these to our attention without exaggeration, and wisely pointed also to the kinship with aspects of Lohengrin. His performance was never over-heated: this is not the Treibhaus of Tristan. It was, however, utterly involving.

Nuages gris received a subtle performance, subtle in terms of intervallic relationships, pointing the way to Webern, and also with respect to dynamic shading. The vertical and the horizontal stood in perfect balance – or fruitful dialectic. Berg’s early sonata emerged intriguingly from the aftermath, both works sharing the importance of the augmented fourth, and Berg’s work also of course pointing the way towards the B minor tonality of Liszt’s own sonata in the second half. Luxuriant Straussian and Schoenbergian textures were held in fruitful tension with the need for concision. More than once, one could hear the Schoenberg of, say, the First Chamber Symphony in what I am tempted to call the ‘hectic clarity’ of developmental counterpoint. Schoenberg’s songs also seemed close in the harmony and placing of chords. If Schoenberg and Debussy were perhaps the most surprising omissions from Aimard’s two recitals – one cannot include everything – then neither composer would be entirely absent in spirit.

Unstern! is as uncompromising as Liszt gets. It received a duly uncompromising performance, starkly persistent in its noble yet desolate emphasis upon – yet again – the tritone. I have not heard a more diabolical performance, the fabled diabolus in musica dramatically as well as theoretically apparent. And the anger: what anger lay in those chords preceding the final, faint hope of redemption! Figuration then took us back to the world of La lugubre gondola, the desperation of Liszt’s late music often lying in its denial of development, whilst all the more strongly implying its necessity. (That is very different from, say, Messiaen, for whom development is often not even an issue.) Scriabin’s ‘Black Mass’ sonata persisted with and yet also transformed the darkness of Unstern! Those hopeless would-be fanfares, still more a hallmark of R.W. – Venezia – not performed here – found their identity as echoes of Liszt, albeit perfumed echoes. There was devilry too, though: for the first time, though certainly not the last, in this recital, Aimard was called upon to deliver the music with true virtuosity, and he did. Debussy on acid, I thought, not least upon hearing those trippy bells of death.

Anyone interested in piano music will have a favourite performance of the Liszt sonata against which to measure others. (Mine is Sviatoslav Richter’s.) It is a state of affairs as inevitable as it is sometimes unfortunate, the danger being that one closes one’s ears to alternative standpoints. Such was the strength of Aimard’s reading that one was soon utterly convinced, a few surprisingly muddy textures at the opening of the exposition proper notwithstanding. Moreover, one certainly heard the introduction with new ears, given the context of the recital as a whole, the radicalism of Liszt’s scales all the more clear, even the best part of three decades earlier than the mysteries of his late works. Throughout there was a fine sense of purpose, if without – at least earlier on – the abandon of some. Motivic working was lain bare with exemplary clarity: an especially important consideration in this of all works, Liszt’s transformative technique crucial to even the most basic analytical understanding. The second subject was exquisitely shaped, as ravishing as any operatic melody, yet all the more meaningful given the motivic transformation that had brought us to that stage. Any of the slight textural doubts I had entertained earlier on were banished by the development. Ugly, or at least dark, sounds were not banished, but incorporated, above all into truly thumping chords: it is worth reiterating that this was a sonata definitely heard through the ears of what was to come. And yet, the line so magically spun in the slow movement – itself part of the one-movement development in Liszt’s daring formal scheme – could not have been more delicately voiced. The fugato/scherzo/false recapitulation was Mephistophelian rather than darkly diabolical: contrapuntal clarity negated rather than terrified, Faust chosen over theology in Aimard’s reading. That said, there was an overwhelming sense of arrival at the true dawn of the recapitulation, during which any slight earlier inhibition was quite forgotten, the obsessive nature of Liszt’s motivic working intensified in Aimard’s grand yet detailed sweep. This time around, the second subject was truly heart-stopping, not least since the moment of rare – in every sense – beauty was so hard-won. One feared, as one ought to, for the pianist’s safe passage through the horrendous double octaves, but he emerged, if not quite unscathed, then with great credit. The final peace was a little uneasy, most likely not passing understanding: very much of a piece with the spirit of Aimard’s performance throughout. At last, a noisy audience fell silent.

Garrick Ohlsson: Handel, Brahms, Liszt, and Scriabin, 29 November 2011

Wigmore Hall

Handel – Suite no.2 in F major, HWV 427
Brahms – Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, op.24
Liszt – Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, S 173/3
Scriabin – Trois Etudes, op.56
Fragilité, op.51 no.1
Piano Sonata no.5, op.53


It was not entirely clear what the two halves of this recital had in common, apart, that is, from pianist Garrick Ohlsson, though it was an attractive enough collection of pieces, even if performances only intermittently caught fire. Handel’s F major Suite – not the B-flat major Suite from which Brahms would take his theme – opened promisingly, the ‘Adagio’ first movement delicately Romantic, perhaps sounding more Bachian than one tends to hear (insofar as one hears Handel’s keyboard suites at all). The following ‘Allegro’ received a clean performance, a bit Gouldian for my taste, not least in its unyielding brightness. Murray Perahia imparts greater grace and depth to this repertoire. I missed a proper sense of momentum in the third movement ‘Adagio’, which was also occasionally heavy-handed, a besetting problem for a good part of the recital, The closing fugue certainly boasted contrapuntal clarity, though again, a greater willingness to yield might have elicited more grateful results.



Brahms’s Handel Variations followed. Again, Ohlsson opened promisingly, Handel’s Air actually sounding more elegantly idiomatic than much of the complete suite had done. The early variations set up a variable pattern that would be followed throughout: some finely characterised playing, some less so. For instance, the first variation sounded choppy and – that word again – unyielding, whereas its successor magically revelled in Brahms’s Schumannesque writing, the intimations of his later Haydn Variations wonderfully apparent. The third variation fell somewhere in between. I liked Ohlsson’s shaping of the composer’s Bachian reminiscences (the B-flat minor Prelude from Book I sprang to mind) in the fifth variation, whilst the eleventh, though it rippled pleasantly enough, somewhat lacked poetry. The rich tone lavished upon the thirteenth variation overcame a nearby intervention from a wristwatch chime. (Unforgivably, the same watch would intervene precisely an hour later in the second half.) However, the fourteenth suffered from an unduly abrupt ending: surely a case in which Brahms’s gruffness benefits from a little tempering. It was something of a tonal relief to reach G minor in the twenty-first variation, but execution remained prosaic, lacking fantasy, whilst the final, twenty-fifth variation sounded more heavy than joyous. Much the same could be said of the fugue, in which Ohlsson again declined to adopt a more yielding approach. There was much to be said for his structural grasp, the connection between variations and the theme clear throughout; yet man, even Brahms, cannot live on structure alone.

Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans sa solitude received an increasingly involving performance, though it laboured a little under a weighty opening not entirely free of the ponderousness of which Ohlsson’s sometime teacher, Claudio Arrau, often stood accused by his detractors (for me, quite unjustly). This was nevertheless preferable to mere flashiness, and there was much to enjoy in the richness of tone Ohlsson conjured from the piano: an excellent Steinway ‘demonstration’. He can sustain a line too, as became increasingly apparent. If the central section does not necessarily show Liszt at his most inspired, I have heard it sound considerably less prosaic than it did here. The remainder of the work permitted a degree of poetic fantasy often lacking elsewhere. There were, however, a few unfortunate harmonic hangovers that might have been alleviated by more careful pedalling. (Sometimes even Liszt’s own pedal markings need reinterpretation for a modern instrument.)

The first two of Scriabin’s three op.56 Etudes emerged both glittering and languorous, delicate enigmas vying with an apt degree of skittishness. (That watch alarm this time collaborated with someone towards the back of the hall endlessly rummaging in a plastic bag.) The third, however, emerged in glassy, even brutal tone. Laughter greeting its conclusion bewildered, for whatever accusations of excess one might hurl at Scriabin, a riotous sense of humour is not the most obviously founded candidate. Fragilité was a pleasant enough interlude, but the fifth sonata was clearly the (spiced, even perfumed) meat to this section. Ohlsson’s performance shared both the virtues and the vices of what had gone before. Yet, if his is hardly the most ingratiating of pianism, he exhibited a fine sense of form here, a requirement not always fulfilled in music that can often sound merely elusive, arguably incomprehensible. It was a pity that such elucidation was mitigated by a considerable degree of heavy-handed bludgeoning. As for the charmless Chopin encores, the less said the better.