Touching restraint and nobility from Anne-Sophie Mutter at Usher Hall, plus the best of November 2018's classical concerts
Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Anne-Sophie Mutter at Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★☆
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra appeared to have pulled off quite a coup by securing the services of two of the world’s most eminent musicians for a single concert: the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Polish composer/conductor Krzysztof Penderecki. In the end, however, for undisclosed “personal reasons”, Penderecki couldn’t make it for what would have been one of numerous worldwide celebrations of his 85th birthday. Well, as the 55-year-old Mutter quipped in an entertaining pre-concert interview, when you get past 50, you do tend to have off days.
Penderecki’s stand-in on the podium was, in fact, hardly a stand-in at all. Thomas Søndergård is the RSNO’s new Music Director, formalising his relationship with the orchestra after six years as Principal Guest Conductor. He clearly relished this opportunity to share the evening with such starry company.
Despite Penderecki’s absence, the advertised programme stayed the same. It was a bold decision for Mutter to show off her skills in the 40 intense minutes of uncompromisingly bleak introspection that make up Penderecki’s Second Violin Concerto, Metamorphosen. Unapologetically demanding on soloist, orchestra and listeners, it proved a rewarding, deeply cathartic experience for all involved – and was warmly appreciated by an Edinburgh audience renowned for its fussiness.
Mutter clearly knows the dark, troubled Concerto inside out; Penderecki wrote it for her in 1995 and she premiered it while her first husband, Detlef Wunderlich, was dying of cancer. Though it has its passages of flashy fireworks, it’s not an overly showy work, and Mutter played it as though reaching beyond the music to its underlying narrative: from the assertive heartbeats of its opening to the lamenting chorales slowly fading at its close.
Hers was a big-boned, confident account – distinguished by unshakeable self-belief – of what’s actually quite an episodic work, sometimes variable in its invention, and owing a distinct debt to Shostakovich, Bartók, and in certain passages, even Britten. The Concerto’s restrained apotheosis, following a fearsomely fiery cadenza from Mutter, made for compelling listening, with its shifting, elusive tonalities and seemingly inexorable journey to silence. The violinist delivered it with touching restraint and nobility.
Søndergård and the RSNO could hardly be expected to match Mutter’s deep personal knowledge of the Concerto, and there were moments where the ensemble went slightly awry, or where she pushed them on to greater urgency. But they gave a splendidly detailed, spirited account nonetheless, and one of utter conviction. It’s only a shame that Mutter’s encore – a breathless, breakneck Gigue from Bach’s D minor Partita – was driven rather than dancing and left a sour taste in the mouth.
Søndergård’s sense of telling detail was back on display after the interval in a very fine Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony, as strongly defined and expertly articulated as you could have hoped. The conductor’s fastidious phrasing, right from the swelling string harmonies accompanying the clarinets’ opening statement of Tchaikovsky’s ‘fate’ theme, felt natural and inevitable. His clear-headed dissection of the Symphony’s constituent parts showed, paradoxically, how little there actually is to it – but how glorious Tchaikovsky’s invention is, all the same.
Søndergård’s slow movement was buoyant, brisk, even impetuous, with a fine horn solo from RSNO principal Christopher Gough, and there was terrific bounce and swagger to the closing perorations. An admirable warmth and trust has clearly developed between Søndergård and the RSNO players. His enthusiasm to lead the orchestra into more challenging, unfamiliar repertoire – even when serving as a stand-in – is further cause for applause. DK
LPO/Orozco-Estrada, London Festival Hall ★★★★☆
Fortuitously enough, while writing his new double concerto for violin and cello, the French composer Pascal Dusapin alighted on Flann O'Brien's 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds. Although the composer denies trying to create any sort of musical equivalence, it seems that this pioneering piece of Irish literary postmodernism did more than merely lend its title to Dusapin's work. Those enigmatic "Two-Birds" might just be reflected in the two-movement structure, rather than the traditional three of most concertos, and it's hard not to see them in the pair of soloists, Viktoria Mullova and Matthew Barley – partners in music and in life.
Receiving its first British performance by the co-commissioning London Philharmonic under Andrés Orozco-Estrada, following its premiere in Amsterdam 14 months ago, At Swim-Two-Birds proved itself another of Dusapin's exquisitely made scores. Very much a double concerto, it features a certain amount of animated duologue, often with very sparse orchestral interventions. The prevailing mood, though, is of suspended lyricism and rapt stillness, and the music is very French in its preoccupation with timbre. Dusapin's soundscape certainly transports the listener, but does it really go anywhere?
Texture is also crucial in the other big work on this programme, Martinu's Fourth Symphony, yet here shimmering energy is harnessed to rigorous symphonic argument. As perhaps the American-exiled Czech composer's answer to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, it also revels in calm after a storm – in this case, the advent of peace in 1945.
Orozco-Estrada's balletic podium presence might initially have suggested that he was more interested in illustrating than illuminating the work, and indeed the opening movement could have been tauter, but he went on to draw fleet-footed playing in the scherzo and found emotional depth in the slow movement. Enterprising LPO programming meant that this was Martinu's second Festival Hall outing in a month; here's hoping that the rightly enthusiastic audience response encourages more.
This ingeniously designed programme – far from typical London orchestra fare – was bookended by Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 and Ravel's La Valse. On the exact centenary of Romania re-absorbing a province from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, the juxtaposition of these two giddily swirling scores worked brilliantly. If Ravel's most innovative and daring work suggests Vienna dancing towards destruction, Enescu's best-loved masterpiece evokes a nation finding its voice and its impact here – once Orozco-Estrada overcame a temptation to micro-manage – was dazzling. JA
Next LPO concerts at the Festival Hall: November 30, December 5 and 8. www.lpo.org.uk
Christian Gerhaher & Gerold Huber, Wigmore Hall ★★★★☆
No glamour, no gimmicks, no letting your hair down or winking at the gallery: this recital presented uncompromisingly serious music-making of the rarest quality, delivered by the peerless partnership of baritone Christian Gerhaher and pianist Gerold Huber. We came out of the hall not so much refreshed as exalted: mere mortal that I am, I just wish that there had been some light relief in a programme that verged on the solemn.
The sun came out only briefly in an opening group of Schubert’s Rückert settings, including the staple Du bist die Ruh and Lachen und Weinen, as well as the lesser-known but arresting Dass sie hier gewesen. All of them had shades of charm, radiated through a seamlessly smooth legato that put me in mind of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Windhover or champion skaters gliding serenely across the ice. Can it be as effortless as it seems? These supreme musicians certainly don't over-sell or grandstand their art, they never hector or show off: Gerhaher, the sweetest of singers, seems rather to muse wistfully, gently caressing every phrase, savouring the colour of words, and perhaps at times over-indulging his trait of coming off a note and letting it fade into something like a hum.
What followed Schubert was a landscape of unremitting grey sky: a cycle of four bleak monologues specially composed for Gerhaher and Huber this year by the venerable German composer Wolfgang Rihm, using verse drawn from Goethe’s dreary play Torquato Tasso. Composed in a generic Second Vienna School atonal idiom without expressive variety or discernible shape, they were firmly put in their place after the interval, when Berg’s exquisitely chiseled and limpid Op.2 miniatures achieved everything and more that Rihm was striving after in half of the time and a quarter of the notes.
Hugo Wolf dominated the second half, and here the performance was nothing short of sublime. The crystalline delicacy of Huber’s playing of the complex piano parts was matched by Gerhaher’s absolute clarity of tonal focus and security of pitch, extending into both bass and tenor territory. Goethe’s three Harfenspieler songs were almost unbearably intense in their sense of bitter isolation; six Mörike settings, ranging from the storm-tossed Begegnung to the pious meditation of Schlafendes Jesuskind, held the audience in rapt religious stillness.
One quibble: why was the provenance of the very odd encore unannounced? RC
Järvi/Glass/Reich, LSO Barbican ★★☆☆☆
Orchestras are naturally rather staid beasts, but sometimes they’re gripped by a desire to show they can be groovy. The results tend to be excruciating, like parents dancing badly at their teenage daughter’s party.
Last night’s concert from the London Symphony Orchestra was a particularly toe-curling example. The warning signs were there in the programme notes, where the concert’s conductor Kristjan Järvi described his own piece, Too Hot to Handel (geddit?), as being like “when the motoric beats of electronica meet Baroque music, it’s like Radiohead that segues into Handel ...” Wicked!
Järvi’s piece was part of the evening’s mash-up of American minimalism and Baroque music, with the LSO beefed up by the addition of electronic keyboards and bass guitar. Three of the pieces were unashamedly based on borrowings from Baroque music – Järvi’s, which lifted whole movements from Handel’s Concerti Grossi, and two from composer Charles Coleman based on Handel and Bach. Alongside them were Philip Glass’s recent Piano Concerto no 3, and a brand-new concerto specially written for the orchestra by Steve Reich, entitled simply Music for Ensemble and Orchestra.
This fusion of eras made a certain sense. The insistent repeating patterns of Bach and Handel can seem like the repeating patterns of minimalism, at a distance, but all Järvi and Coleman achieved by mingling them together in their pieces was to show that they’re worlds apart. As were the modest talents of Coleman and Järvi, when compared to Bach’s and Handel’s genius. The movements from Coleman’s Bach Inspired that simply draped Bach’s notes in grand orchestrations were pleasant enough, in a way oddly reminiscent of those old-time arrangers of Bach like Thomas Beecham, only not so skilful. But Coleman’s own Reich-like repeating grooves sounded terribly lame beside them.
Even worse was Järvi’s 13-movement suite, an exasperatingly indulgent layering of Handel’s music over would-be groovy bass licks, tricked out with percussion. You can’t just take a Baroque dance with a fast rate of harmonic change and stick a slow pop-flavoured bass underneath. The result is pure nonsense, in the strict sense of the word. Composing just isn’t that easy.
Glass’s piano concerto was exasperating in a different way. It began slow and got slower, and all the heartfelt expressivity of soloist Simone Dinnerstein couldn’t lift Glass’s limp little repeating phrases out of banality. Fortunately Reich’s new concerto saved the evening from being a total dud. The performance wasn’t triumphant. There were serious problems of balance, with the solo strings drowned by the electronic keyboard, and the rhythms weren’t always as razor-sharp as they needed to be. But the music’s delightful dancing wit, and the moving, almost ritualistic calm of the slow movement, shone through. IH
Le Willis, Opera Rara, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆
“We have here not a young student but a new Bizet or Massenet,” wrote a reviewer in 1884, after hearing the première of Puccini’s first operatic exercise, Le Willis. Not a new Verdi, note, because at that point he was considered old hat, but instead someone who could rival the fashionable Gallic eroticism and sensationalism of Carmen or Manon.
Also note that this is Le Willis. Puccini lovers may know of the two-act Le Villi, occasionally exhumed and recorded: but here that score was presented in its original one-act form, written for a competition and subsequently expanded on the crest of its success. Opera Rara’s splendid concert allowed us to hear this novelty in its original form for the first time in 134 years, and it proved a winner.
The feeble wisp of plot loosely follows the same lines as that of the ballet Giselle, in which an innocent maiden betrayed by her lover dies and becomes a vengeful spirit. It may be notable only for the trope of victimised womanhood that would remain one of Puccini’s staple obsessions, but its clichés are milked with irresistible gusto and the music just gushes forth. In its lushness and emotional immediacy, the idiom does indeed bear the hallmarks of Carmen and Manon, but there is a sense of an authentically individual style evolving as well, especially in the grandly lachrymose trio that brings the first scene to a glorious climax. Anyone would award this student essay A for effort, ambition and promise; the eloquence of its melodies seems more like a gift from God.
There are three soloists. Ermonela Jaho played the winsome heroine: her transports of emotion were rather old-school operatic in manner, but she gave her all, drawing on vocal reserves belied by her ballerina figure. Arsen Soghomonyan revealed a warm, mellifluous tenor as the faithless lover and Brian Mulligan did the business efficiently as the heroine’s stern father. To the delight of a large and appreciative audience, Jaho and Soghomonyan sang arias that Puccini added to the extended version as encores.
The first half of the evening had been imaginatively programmed to include pieces that offered interesting glosses on the young Puccini’s musical thinking. Bizet’s robustly Provençal suite for L’Arlésienne and Verdi’s exhilaratingly satanic ballet music for the 1865 recension of Macbeth were both played with terrific verve by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the evening’s maestro Mark Elder, who seemed to be enjoying himself. He was not the only one. RC
Christian Marclay, The Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music ★★★☆☆
The Huddersfield Festival likes to bag a big name in contemporary music to be “resident composer” each year, but some may balk at the choice of Christian Marclay. This is an artist famous for mixed-media installations, often involving found materials. His 24-hour film The Clock, which pillages hundreds of films for tiny scenes naming an exact time of day, is still entertaining audiences at Tate Modern. He’s made some witty sound pieces involving broken vinyl records. But resident composer at a music festival? Really?
At first glance, his brand-new piece Investigations seemed to promise something musical. The floor of Huddersfield’s grand town hall was filled with 20 pianos big and small, and seated at each was a pianist, some well-known in the new music world like Noriko Kawai, one or two from the jazz world, like Liam Noble. On each piano was a “score” consisting of 100 photographs of pianists, some showing two hands, some as many as eight, caught in the act of playing something complex and possibly Baroque, or a grand romantic melody, or a jazzy riff. The task for each pianist was to imagine the sound being played at that moment and conjure it up, with help from neighbouring pianists when needed. The result was sometimes surprisingly euphonious in a salon-music kind of way, sometimes spiky and chaotic, and once – when a snatch of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto abruptly burst out – unintentionally hilarious. But overall it seemed a vast squandering of resources to show that chance can sometimes produce something witty. It hardly took us beyond John Cage’s Winter Music, also written for multiple pianos, more than 70 years ago.
The other pieces I heard over the festival’s first weekend were very different in their artful complexity. They were a reminder that the complicated quasi-mathematical systems that were once at the heart of new music are long gone. Now “haptic” pieces are all the rage, which – in case you’re wondering – means an approach to composing focused on the sheer physicality of sound. Listening to this kind of music is like feeling the grain of a log, or allowing sand to trickle through one’s fingers.
That sounds refreshingly innocent, but the pleasures it offers soon pall, as the two pieces by Rebecca Saunders performed on Sunday revealed. Much the more beautiful of the two was a piece for solo percussionist entitled aether. It was played by Dirk Rothbrust with balletic dexterity, and the sounds were indeed aethereal. Among them were glistening chimes from giant spinning triangles which seemed to whirl around one’s head, angelic voices from bowed metal, and unearthly groans from a softly scraped bass drum. Saunders arranged these sounds in a pleasing rise-and-fall of tension and relaxation, but given the fabulously colourful array of sound-objects on stage any ordering of thwacks and feathery strokes would have been pleasing, just as a pot-pourri of lavender and rose-petals is bound to smell nice.
More satisfying, because it actually engaged with unruly human passions, was Rundfunk (Radio) by fortysomething German composer Enno Poppe. The piece is a love-letter to the funky, futuristic sounds of Sixties electronic music, played by ensemble mosaik on nine digital synthesizers programmed to reproduce those sounds. Echoes of Stockhausen, Tangerine Dream and even gospel organ-sounds mingled in unruly profusion, which at some points rose to the kind of wince-inducing loudness normally encountered only in nightclubs. This was “physicality” with a vengeance, but it was witty and engaging too.
Festival continues until Nov 25. Tickets: 01484 430528; hcmf.co.uk. Highlights of Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music are broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Nov 24, and Dec 1, 8 and 15.
IH
Paul Lewis, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆
Paul Lewis is an old-fashioned sort of piano maestro. He doesn’t try to stimulate our jaded palettes by delving into little-known composers, he doesn’t play on old-style instruments, he never touches contemporary music. He prefers to live on the heights, playing canonical masterworks from Mozart to Brahms.
That’s a bold stance, as it invites comparison with the great pianists of old, from Richter to Brendel. As this concert showed, Lewis can easily sustain the comparison. He walked on stage with unostentatious confidence, too focused on the task in hand to give us a smile, and plunged straight into the stormy opening of Brahms’s late set of Seven Fantasies.
This was the opening gambit in a programme that explored the affinities between three great Vienna-based composers: Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms. You might imagine there would be a distinct difference in sound-world between the three: the small-boned, dry classical wit of Haydn opening out by degrees through the abrupt humour of Beethoven, and then into the more romantic, soft-edged world of Brahms. But that’s not quite how things played out.
Certainly there were moments in Brahms’s Fantasies when Lewis used the pedal to blur the edges of a transition between two harmonies, and lend them an air of nostalgia. On the other hand, the mysterious fifth piece in the set, which many pianists enshroud with a mist of pedal, emerged here with perfect clean clarity. Lewis wanted to show us that the sheer oddity of the music, with its strange “limping” rhythm and harmonies, emerges more powerfully when you can hear it clearly.
The most romantic moments actually came in music by the most “classical” composer of the evening, Joseph Haydn. In his early C Minor Sonata, Lewis made a huge pause on one expectant harmony, allowing it to reverberate to infinity before bringing us back to earth. Moments such as this made it clear that for Lewis, Haydn and Brahms are full of secret affinities, as if their music is conversing amicably in some timeless realm.
Beethoven too is part of the same conversation, as Lewis’s performance of his early set of Bagatelles proved. One didn’t get much sense of the music’s smile – Lewis is too loftily serious for that – but its tenderness and strength emerged full-force.
Paul Lewis’s recent recording of Haydn piano sonatas is released on Harmonia Mundi.
IH
Batiashvili, Capuçon, Thibaudet, Barbican ★★★★★
In recent years, concert venues have cottoned on to a wonderful fact about chamber music: it allows them to field bankable stars in enticing combinations, without the expense of hiring an orchestra to accompany them. As a result, we’ve seen the emergence of new “power duos” and “power trios” made up of star violinists, cellists and pianists, each of whom is a big draw in their own right.
On Sunday night, we saw one such trio, made up of Georgian-born violinist Lisa Batiashvili, French cellist Gautier Capuçon and French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. It was interesting to compare them with another power trio seen on the same stage only a few weeks ago. That had one outsize personality in the form of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, held in balance by the lofty purity of violinist Leonidas Kavakos and pianist Emanuel Ax’s sly subtlety. Last night, there was no dominant personality. The trio really did move and breathe as one, which in terms of instant impact was less thrilling, but ultimately served the music better.
The first piece certainly needed unanimity, to cope with its bewildering switchbacks of mood. Shostakovich composed his 1st Piano Trio when he was only 17, but it’s an amazingly assured bringing together of yearning romanticism, Prokofiev-like sarcasms, and an almost too-sweet otherworldliness, all within a single 20-minute movement. It’s easy to play up the abruptness of the contrasts for dramatic effect, but these players focused on making subtle transitions between the different areas, adding a poetic touch of diffidence to adolescent fire and fantasy.
Ravel’s great trio is an altogether grander thing, needing a superb control of line across large spans of time. In this performance the slow movement was especially fine, unfolding with unflagging concentration and building to a climax of orchestral amplitude. The moments of lyricism were played by Capuçon with a certain aristocratic reserve, which made their nostalgia shine out all the more brightly. At the opposite pole was the triumphant tumult of the final movement, which to me often seems forced (Ravel seemed to have trouble with finales) but here felt genuinely overwhelming.
Finally came Mendelssohn’s 2nd Piano Trio. Once again the trio conjured a completely new sound world, exactly right for the music’s combination of strenuous moral uplift and romantic fervour. Here, it was Batiashvili’s way of allowing a triumphant phrase to melt into intimacy that turned a fine performance into a great one. IH
Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★☆
It was barely 10 minutes long, but the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Armistice commemoration commission formed the calm, contemplative centrepiece of what ended up as quite an uneven concert under French/German cellist/conductor Nicolas Altstaedt.
The commission in question was from Glasgow-born Martin Suckling, and his Meditation (after Donne) has quite a back story. Thinking back to the bells that pealed across the country to mark the Great War Armistice a century ago, Suckling had crowd-sourced recordings of bells today from listeners across Scotland, collating and ordering the resulting sound files, then weaving them together in a keyboard-triggered tapestry of clangorous sounds and textures. Alongside his bell soundscape, diffused across the interior of Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall, he conjured piquant, microtonal orchestral harmonies that emerged imperceptibly from the bells’ jangling overtones, or summoned a naive, folk-like string tune that threaded through them, or later a gnarly, keening oboe duet.
The result was impressively immediate, thoroughly captivating, and well received by the Edinburgh audience. And it melded together with uncanny ease the somewhat contradictory senses of celebration, anger and grief that Suckling had described in his pre-concert talk. Beyond that, though, it was the fragile sense of community the work suggested – in creating a shared space for reflection, whose origins lie in contributions from right across Scotland – that created the piece’s potent emotional resonance – and one that tied it neatly to the John Donne Meditation No. 17 that inspired it. Only some slightly mystifying typewriter-like key-clicks from the woodwind struck a slightly unconvincing note in an otherwise enthralling score.
Altstaedt directed Suckling’s work with calm, slightly detached precision and unquestioning conviction. If only the same could have been said for his perplexingly unconvincing first half. His opening Wagner Siegfried Idyll was as soft and gooey as marshmallow – so microscopically managed, with so much pulling around of the tempo, that it struggled to find any sense of overall shape. And his Schumann Cello Concerto, which he directed (mostly) from the cello, was an unhappy, restless account with tone and articulation sometimes sacrificed in the cause of raw expression – a situation not helped by Altstaedt leaping unexpectedly to his feet to direct orchestra-only sections, his cello balanced precariously in his left hand.
It fell to his concluding Beethoven Eighth Symphony to save the day – and with its bounding energy, its confident swagger and its mischievous humour, it did just that.
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra repeats the concert tonight (Fri 9 Nov) in Glasgow’s City Halls.
DK
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Lighthouse, Poole ★★★★☆
When contemporary music ventures down from its ivory tower to engage with the world, it’s often with a certain cautious distance. One often hears pieces that lament or rage against tyranny in general, or the state of the environment. It’s rare to hear pieces that actually point the finger.
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new piece for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra breaks the mould. Entitled Testament, it is a prolonged cry of defiance against the oppression suffered by Ukraine at Russian hands down the centuries, a theme perhaps encouraged by the orchestra’s Ukrainian Chief Conductor Kirill Karabits, but which surely must have been in Turnage’s mind already, given the impassioned nature of the music.
It takes the form of settings of four poems, the earliest of which was written in Tsarist times, when the Ukrainian language was banned. Another was written by a poet who died in a Soviet labour camp; the latest is about the conflict in the Donetsk region, where Russian-backed separatists continue to agitate. The note of protest and lament resounds through all of them. “Weep, sky and Weep!” says the second. “Summon the lion within you!” begins the third. The fourth is the most resigned, advising only flight. “We are refugees. We will run all night.”
Turnage has written many pieces of mourning and remembrance, and one might have expected this one to share their tone of bluesy mournfulness. One does hear that, in the background, but more insistent is the sound of Ukrainian folk-songs. In a subtle move, Turnage doesn’t give these songs to the soprano soloist. Instead they keen away in the woodwinds, circling round on themselves in endless dialogue, like a memory of home that cannot be stilled. These purely orchestral passages establish a solemn, quietly lamenting mood; the soprano, the thrillingly intense Natalya Romaniw, introduced a note of angry, burning intensity, especially in the hectic third song, which sounded like a pursuit. It was a powerfully affecting, dark and yet dignified piece.
Compared to that, the other two pieces, both by composers with Ukrainian connections, seemed as light as puff-pastry. Reinhold Glière’s Les Sirènes was an escapist fantasy of the kind Stalin seemed to love, tricked out with swirling harps, rustling diaphanous strings and Wagnerian sumptuousness. Prokofiev’s War and Peace Suite, drawn from his opera was a parade of spectacular scenes, with mazurkas and polonaises and a fantastically magical snowstorm scene. The orchestra and Karabits played both with magnificent, full-blooded élan. IH
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Nesterowicz, Barbican ★★★★☆
This has been a good year for Ignacy Jan Paderewski – composer, virtuoso pianist and statesman. The centenary of Polish independence, which he sealed at the Paris Peace Conference and which propelled him into prime ministerial office, has inspired something of a retrospective of his music. Although his magnificent Piano Concerto (1888) has never completely vanished from music lovers’ consciousness it remains a rarity, so its appearance here as part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s celebratory Polish programme was hugely welcome.
It is an invigorating work, with a long first movement calling for plenty of virtuosity. But right from the piano’s wistful opening statement, a sense of poetry is equally strong, and this is where the soloist Janina Fialkowska stamped her mark. More measured in her approach than some interpreters, she was at her best in the central slow movement, capturing and beautifully sustaining the delicate writing. Together with the conductor Michał Nesterowicz, she showed how this fully fledged Romantic piano concerto has retained a distinctive Polish flavour in spite of invoking Brahms and Tchaikovsky as points of reference.
Dedicated to Paderewski, Elgar’s symphonic prelude Polonia was written to support the Polish cause in 1915. It’s a glorious piece, cladding several quotes from Polish music — including what would become the national anthem — in characteristically brilliant Elgarian orchestral colours. But it is almost never played these days, so it was inspired programming to feature it here, a gesture justified by the BBCSO’s pungent performance under Nesterowicz’s bracing baton.
Specially commissioned from one of Poland’s leading contemporary composers, Paweł Szymanski’s Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson Overture received its world premiere. Its title acknowledges the peace-making role of one of the greatest US presidents (his 13th point called for independence to be restored to Poland), but apart from the music being divided into 14 brief sections there is no obvious programmatic suggestion. Yet since the enigmatic Szymanski is no stranger to political statements, something may be concealed within the strikingly ominous textures of his music, punctuated by recurring percussive whip-cracks.
Witold Lutosławski was certainly no stranger to musical messaging: his famous Concerto for Orchestra steered a brilliant course around Stalinist censorship. Much of its style was anticipated in his rarely heard Symphony No. 1, written within convention yet breaking out of it and once banned for its “formalism”. Nesterowicz commanded a bravura performance from the BBCSO, showing what a powerful and, at heart, sorrowful work it remains.
Hear this again on the BBC iPlayer. The BBCSO returns to the Barbican on November 10 and 11 with music marking the centenary of the end of WW1. www.bbc.co.uk/symphonyorchestra
JA
London Sinfonietta, Queen Elizabeth Hall ★★★★☆
One would expect that crack new-music ensemble the London Sinfonietta to play a leading role, in the various musical commemorations of the end of the First World War. The psychological shock of the war, and its “monstrous music” of cannons and bombs and telegraph messages gave a huge impetus to the creation of the sound-world of musical modernism.
But there wasn’t a hint of aural brutalism at the Sinfonietta’s concert on Thursday night, which launched out with a warning. This came from Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon of 1942, a tirade against tyranny in the form of a setting of Byron’s famous meditation on the sheer nothingness of Napoleon after his defeat, marooned on his island prison. Bass Alan Ewing had to recite the poem against Schoenberg’s strenuously angry music for string quartet and piano, played with huge expressivity by a quintet of Sinfonietta players. This made it difficult for him to muster the “hundred and seventy kinds of derision, sarcasm, hatred, ridicule, contempt, condemnation” the composer asked for. One became aware of his struggles, and despite everyone’s best efforts the piece seemed somewhat monochrome in its incessant anger. Yet somehow the burning moral passion of the music shone through.
Much more subtle in its variety of feeling was the music composed by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth to accompany the 1914 Belgian silent film Maudite soit la guerre (Cursed be war). It tells the story of two young airman, one of whom is in love with the other’s sister, who end up fighting each other on opposing sides. They are both killed, and the distraught sister ends her days in a convent.
Neuwirth’s score, scored for a motley ensemble of electronics, out-of-tune guitar, gongs, synthesizer and a handful of regular instruments, was like a musical seismograph acutely sensitive to every tremor of emotion one might otherwise miss. One caught the mystique of flight – now entirely gone from the world – with aerial shots pitched against tiny high electronic sounds, and the dangerous seduction of technophilia, with sounds suggestive of corruption accompanying scenes of aircraft wings being lovingly polished. Most moving and suggestive were the domestic scenes. Here the shy encounters of the airman and his friend’s sister were accompanied by sweetly sentimental sounds of a salon piano, evoked on a detuned synthesizer, while muted brass and electronic sounds suggested the coming war, waiting to pounce somewhere beyond the lovers’ neatly tended garden.
The London Sinfonietta marks Armistice Day with a performance of Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs at the Royal Festival Hall London 020 3879 9555
IH
