Royal Festival Hall
Debussy:
Berceuse
héroïque
Magnus
Lindberg: Triumf att finnas till… (world premiere)
Stravinsky:
Requiem
Canticles
Janáček:
The
Eternal Gospel
Andrea Danková (soprano)
Angharad Lyddon (mezzo-soprano)
Vsevolod Grivnov (tenor)
Maxim Mikhailov (bass)
London Philharmonic Choir (chorus master: Neville Creed)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)
If an armistice remembrance concert is to be held – and surely it is not unreasonable to do so, one hundred years on from 1918 – let it be programmed like this. Yes, official remembrance has, in the very worst sense, been politicised way beyond endurance for most of us in the United Kingdom. What once was more, if never entirely, a remembrance of lives lost, of the evil of war, has, especially since New Labour’s murderous forays into Afghanistan and Iraq, become a totalitarian exhortation to militaristic nationalism. The annual accusatory ordeal of poppy fascism, seemingly receding further and further back in October with every year, should have been abandoned long ago. This, however, had none of that; there was, mercifully, nothing nationalistic to what we heard here. Moreover, if most of the musicians on stage, both in the orchestra and chorus, wore poppies, then it was heartening to see a good few, Vladimir Jurowski included, wearing white.
Debussy’s Berceuse héroïque, his ‘heroic lullaby’, as originally conceived, ‘to
pay homage to H.M. King Albert I of Belgium and his soldiers’, said much of
what needed to be said. The dark, opening spareness of this London Philharmonic
performance sounded as if Debussy, as if we, were remembering the malevolence,
the violence, internal and external, of Allemonde, the doomed, fractured society
of Pelléas et Mélisande. Maybe of Allemande too: a country about which our
‘musicien français’ showed a distinct lack of wartime understanding. Perhaps
Busoni’s earlier Berceuse élégiaque
would have proved more universal; perhaps that is partly the point. All of us
fall short in our particularities, our proclivities, our prejudices; all of us
can do better. The stifling seduction – nationalism does that too – of the
soundworld was poignantly judged in a typically controlled performance from
Jurowski that yet lacked nothing in atmosphere or drama.
I remain, alas, at a loss to
understand what has happened to Magnus Lindberg. Is the composer of Triumf att finnas till… (‘Triumph to
exist…’), premiered here, and the Second
Violin Concerto, premiered three years ago, really the composer of Kraft? Lindberg’s new choral work sets,
in essentially through-composed fashion, seven poems by Edith Södergran. I was
delighted to encounter her poetry for the first time earlier this year in Unsuk
Chin’s Le Chant des enfants des étoiles.
Lindberg, quoted briefly in the programme, speaks admiringly and eloquently of
Södergran’s verse and ‘its meditation on the transience of life … [a] defiantly
positive affirmation of the joy of existence, the outpouring of one who refuses
to submit to the hopelessness all around her.’ For him ‘it says something
deeply essential about the tragedy of millions of young men who gave their
lives in that useless slaughter.’ I wish I could have thought the same of his
setting, which seemed on a first hearing to do little more than, well, set the
verse, in a musical language that would have seemed unchallenging at the time of
Södergran’s writing. At a pinch, the opening bars might have grown out of
Debussy: I noticed in particular the writing for harp. The music, however,
quickly grew into something more conventionally ‘late Romantic’. Some of its
lush chordal harmonies might have been taken from Szymanowski, albeit without
the complexity of texture. The word setting is likewise conventional to a tee, ‘Gloria!
Seger!’ sounding just as one might expect. It was probably fun to sing, fun to
play even: all quite pleasant. Is that enough? The London Philharmonic Choir,
LPO, and Jurowski certainly gave a committed, commanding performance.
Another composer long accused
of stylistic reversion was Stravinsky. Now, even in most of his neo-Classical
works, we tend to hear what unites them with music from elsewhere in his
career. Stravinsky always sounds above all like Stravinsky. Perhaps the same
will prove true of Lindberg. At any rate, the late serial Stravinsky remains a
rare treat, as rare in every sense as the music of Webern, to which it owes so
much and from which it nevertheless remains quite distinct. Requiem Canticles I have longed for some
time to hear ‘live’; it was unquestionably worth the wait. A smaller orchestra
and chorus were joined by mezzo Angharad Lyddon and bass Maxim Mikhailov, all
on fine form – even if, very occasionally, an orchestral line sounded on the
verge of failing (nothing remotely on the scale of Robert Craft’s feeble
performance in the ‘Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky’ set, though).
Rhythm and harmony revealed as
great an affinity with the allegedly ‘different’ Stravinsky of The Rake’s Progress of a
decade-and-a-half earlier as with other, more expected Stravinskys. The
composer’s cellular processes were laid bare, not drily, but with an urgency
announced from the off, as the purely orchestral ‘Prelude’ set string serial
hounds of hell to their work. How individual the composer’s writing for strings
always proves to be; how genuinely different his way of hearing these
instruments seems to have been. If the ‘Exaudi’ seemed initially to have stolen
a harp from Agon or Movements, the chorus reminded us this
was the composer of the austere – until one truly listens – 1940s Mass. Ritual
in Stravinsky is sometimes all, but it is ritual imbued with the keenest sense
of drama. ‘Tradition’ was reinvented time and time again, in the ‘Dies irae’ –
those trombones and timpani – in the ‘Tuba mirum’ – trumpets, trombone, bass,
followed by a pair of ineffably Stravinskian bassoons – and beyond. Every
interval, just as in Webern, counted. If the ‘Interlude’ offered fearful
symmetries both in itself and in the work as a whole, a magic square write
large, the ensuing ‘Rex tremendae’ reminded us that this work is, amongst many
other things, a musical reliquary, every note a jewel, every silence its
setting. Lyddon’s coloratura in the ‘Lacrimosa’ seemed to cast one ear back to
Anne Trulove from the Rake, the purgatorial
choral chatter of the ‘Libera me’ as startling, as incomparable as anything in
the repertory. Its cold terror reminded us, had us remember. The bells of
Stravinskian hereafter tolled, more to the point sealed the musical and
theological structure, in the ‘Postlude’. This is music we should hear far more
often.
Finally, joined by soprano
Andrea Danková and tenor Vsevolod Grivnov, we heard Janáček’s cantata, Věčné evangelium (‘The Eternal Gospel’).
Like Stravinsky, Janáček is almost always unmistakeable, certainly by this
stage in his career. Obstinacy of motivic repetition and yet ultimate
malleability spoke, even in the orchestral prelude, of Jenůfa and Katya Kabanova.
There were times when Jurowski might, perhaps, have exerted less iron control
or at least permitted a greater sense of the visionary. By the same token,
however, there is much to be said for precision. If Grivnov (Joachim of Fiore) sometimes
sounded a little parted, Danková, as the Angel, proved properly of another
world. Grivnov’s closing solo in any case turned out to be a duly operatic
reflection on what had passed, a mini scena
of its own. Is there hope? Was Joachim’s kingdom of love dawning? Can it yet? Who
knows? If here the eternal
flame did not always quite blaze, flames are like that: often they will flicker.
Blaze it certainly did at the close.
