Prom 8: BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Conducted by Thierry Fischer
Britten, Prokofiev, Shostakovich
Two overrated pieces and a flat-out masterpiece I used to think was overrated. Let's put the cards on the table: I don't like Prokofiev. Yes, he certainly has better and worse pieces. But I can't escape the feeling that a lot of his music is noise that expresses nothing except empty gymnastics, worship of technique for its own sake, and mechanical bombast. Listening to his first piano concerto is an experience for me not unlike fingernails on a chalkboard. Even a great pianist (and surely Alexander Toradze is one) can't make me like his music any more. I go out of my way to avoid lots of music by Prokofiev, and this piece is near the top of my blacklist. I'm sure that the fault is mine, many artists I deeply respect champion his music all the time. And certainly the RAH audience, who gave a rapturous ovation, totally disagreed with me. The Prokofiev concerto was preceded by Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem. I am, as ever, a huge Britten fan. I think he's one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, but this piece is far from Britten at his strongest. It was Britten's first purely orchestral piece, and he wrote few more after it, perhaps learning from this experience that it wasn't for him. The piece is in three movements, and the middle movement is a fantastic and terrifying roller-coaster that these musicians rode out at maximum intensity (BBCNOW seems to have a wonderful brass section). But the outer two movements bare the marks of an immature composer who couldn't yet develop music over a large-span. Most of it sounds like long-winded filler with minimal material spread incredibly thinly. Then there's Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony: a 80-minute loose baggy monster of a piece that sounds to many people as though it's 90% filler. It amazes me how dense people can be when Shostakovich comes up. They point to the Leningrad Symphony as a perfect examples of Shostakovich's long-windedness, banality and bombast. But this is a war symphony, how else could he have written it? If it's a little too long, who cares? In any event, this was the kind of performance that does supporters of this symphony no favors. It was a slow, reasonably well-played performance that seemed appallingly short on Shostakovichian qualities like humor, violence and menace. There are many ways to approach this piece, but Thierry Fischer managed to pick one that gives its critics as much ammunition as they need. Ultimately, this was not a prom for me.
D
Prom 9: BBC Philharmonic
Vassily Sinaisky Conductor
Parry, Scriabin, Tchaikovsky
Vassily Sinaisky is one of those Soviet-era conductors who subsist on the international circuit by playing a steady diet of Russian composers. Nobody really cares how they would play anything else, and they generally don't try. But conductors like him, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Yuri Temirkanov and Valery Gergiev have earned their crust by travelling the world and introducing musicians and audiences not only to forgotten Russian music but also to forgotten Russian performing styles. Dynamics are more exaggerated, tempos are more flexible, and the sound of the instruments much more raw. Their musicmaking is provincial in the best sense. So it was doubly surprising that Sinaisky chose to begin not only with British music but unknown British music. Hubert Parry is now probably best known for being the mentor of Ralph Vaughan Williams, but he was a fine composer in his own right and still sometimes worth hearing. In this case, Parry's 5th Symphony was surprisingly engaging - Parry is a thoroughgoing Romantic who composes like a cross between Elgar and Tchaikovsky. Unfortunately the work is hardly a masterpiece, plenty of good ideas but Parry never seemed to know what to do with them. Even so, Sinaisky and the BBC Phil clearly appreciated the work for its good qualities and played it for everything it was worth. Then came the Scriabin Piano Concerto, a work Scriabin completed when he was still very young and not yet the firebrand he became in middle age. The slow movement is a beautiful theme and variations that foreshadows the genius Scriabin would later become, savored wonderfully by pianist Nelson Goerner. But I'd still rather hear these musicians play the Poem of Fire because the other two movements were made in the "Generic Romantic Piano Concerto Assembly Line." The concert ended with a surprisingly disciplined and restrained performance of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony. I was expecting a performance in the Svetlanov/Gergiev mould with lots of tempo shifts and huge brass firepower. Instead we got a beautifully shaded performance in the mould of Rozhdestvensky and Ivanov that hewed closer to the score than most other performances ever dare (though hardly without individual touches). It was all in a far more classical style than we're accustomed to hearing Tchaikovsky, an equally valid and sometimes more effective way to approach Tchaikovsky that shows him for the great composer he is in addition to being a very emotional one. It wasn't the most searing Pathetique I've ever heard, but it was a damn fine performance and many conductors could learn a thing or two from Sinaisky's way with this over-interpreted score.
B
Proms 10 & 11:
Doctor Who Prom
I hear Doctor Who's an incredible show from quite a few friends. But something tells my that I won't figure out how to appreciate it by listening to its soundtrack.
No comments:
Post a Comment