Proms Mini-Reviews 11

Prom 34: German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin
Ingo Metzmacher Conducting
Schrecker, Korngold, Mahler

Ingo Metzmacher is one of the great conductors of our time and it's a shame that the world is likely never to realize this. He has now established a pattern of going into a second-tier organization, pulling stunning work out of them only to stun them with a sudden resignation after only five years on the job. In his latest appointment, he had only reached Year 3 with the inevitable paeans hailing his work as genius before he suddenly announced, gasp!, that he must resign because the city of Berlin was unable to meet his demands for funding. Now that Metzmacher has done exactly the same thing with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester as he did with Ensemble Moderne, the Netherlands Opera, and the Hamburg State Opera, it may be time for people to wake up to the fact that this uncompromising maestro would rather stand on principle than make great music. And so, for the second time this Proms season, we listened to a fine conductor giving his last concert as the director of a fine orchestra which he is leaving for no good reason. Was this the awe-inspiring concert that such an event would merit? Certainly not, it was even far from the best concert Metzmacher's given at the Proms in recent years. It began with much-underrated the overture to an opera by the much-underrated Franz Schreker. Wouldn't it have been a far bolder gesture to bring a Schrecker opera to the Proms? Now that Janacek is finally a mainstream composer, Schreker is the next great genius of the opera-world ripe for rediscovery. But you could never tell from this rambling, over-orchestrated overture to Die Ferne Klang. One day, a champion will come to the aid of Schreker and give him the platform he deserves (in much the way Metzmacher has done for Karl Amadeus Hartman), but I can't help feeling disappointed that this is the most Schreker we'll get at the Proms for a while longer. After a disappointing opening, the great Leonidas Kavakos came out to perform the Violin Concerto of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a piece with special meaning for me because it's my 90-year-old grandmother's favorite piece of music. All due credit to Kavakos, who bathed the work with as much Hollywood schmaltz as the work would allow. But I wish I could tell Bubbie that I love this piece with as much fervor as she does, but the truth is that I only love the last movement. Whatever genius Korngold is considered in a parallel universe, in this universe his greatest music accompanies movies. Thelast movement is a real 'toe-tapper' of an Irish jig, and elucidates to concert audiences that Korngold was a true purveyor of light music in the Grand Manner. But the other two movements are rather generic, and not even Leonidas Kavakos can make me listen with interest. Then came Mahler's much-maligned and misunderstood Seventh Symphony, a performance that won uniformly ecstatic reviews in the press. No doubt, it was a damn good performance. Metzmacher made fantastic sense out of the enormous outer movements of this sprawling five-movement masterpiece (and yes, the M-word applies here), with a Kubelik-esque manic edge to it. Furthermore, the second and third movements, taken at light speed, were fantastic. Textures were displayed with Boulezian clarity (not withstanding some brass clunkers), and the symphony's many dramatic qualities had enormous momentum. All that we missed was warmth, and comparison with Kubelik in this piece readily shows what was missing. This is Mahler with a touch of Stravinsky, done without the mitteleuropische warmth which you'd expect would come to these performers like second nature. And it is invariably in the fourth movement, the Andante Amoroso, where lack of passion/sincerity/whatever proves most damaging. It was in every sense brilliant performance, but IMHO not a great one.
C (Mahler gets a B+)

Prom 35: The Danish National Symphony Orchestra
Thomas Dausgaard conducting
Ligeti, Tchaikovsky. Rued Langgard, Sibelius

The moment the Tchaikovsky concerto began, I knew we were in for a rare concert. Rare is the time when hearing Tchaikovsky can shock anyone, but after two Ligeti pieces for chorus, the sudden intrusion of Tchaikovsky's ever-familiar violin concerto came as a complete shock to the system. The first two Ligeti pieces, Morning and Night, were slight examples of this choral master operating at his cosmic greatest. Ligeti's choral music is still almost entirely the province of professional organizations, but these pieces are early examples of the Transylvanian master operating at his most tonal, and they were sung with wonderful technique and spirit by the Danish National Chorus (which seems to be blowing the BBC Singers out of the water). Then came a rare fever-pitched performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto that can make you listen afresh. I had never heard of Hagen Kraggerud before tonight, but rest assured I will be searching for recordings. Kraggerud's playing was positively Oistrakhian - an impassioned high-calorie sound, with enormously full tone and sensuously wide vibrato, and a total willingness to bend the rhythms (and occasionally entire notes) spontaneously in the heat of momentary intensity. He seemed totally unafraid of 'getting dirty', straining his fiddle well past the point of elegant sound with the rough Russian timbre this piece requires. The accompaniment from Dausgaard and his Danish orchestra was just as fantastically idiomatic. Then came the concert's centerpiece. First the Ligeti Lux Aeterna - a terrifying setting of a text that is usually used for consolation. It's not my favorite Ligeti piece, I like my Ligeti with more humor, but it is classic middle-period Ligeti in which he attempts to lay the demons he left behind the Iron Curtain to rest. It is a profoundly disturbing work, continuously producing ugly sounds that seem to emanate from the realm of the undead. It is not music on the level of Beethoven and Schubert, or even on the level of Ligeti's own Etudes or Clocks and Clouds or Melodien, but it is a type of great music that should never be ignored just because it disturbs. The Ligeti lead immediately into a piece by an early-twentieth century Danish composer so neglected that Steven Schwartz's guide to neglected composers doesn't even list him. At the beginning of his career, Langgaard was lauded as the heir to Carl Nielsen. But by the time he reached thirty, Langgaard was already forgotten. By the time he died in his mid-sixties, he was a church organist in rural Denmark who'd written sixteen symphonies and lots else, little of it ever performed in his lifetime. I'm not sure if the piece of his we heard tonight - the half-hour Music of the Spheres for two orchestras, chorus, organ and soprano - is a masterpiece, but it was fascinating. It was episodic and discursive with material that was never developed, but it was music that sounded like no one else's. Apparently Ligeti was a committed fan of this piece, and he recognized many of his own techniques in this work. Finally came a reading of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony that was among the finest I will ever hear. Very few conductors (Vanska, Berglund, Karajan) are able to reach so far into Sibelius's depictions of nature that the music itself sounds like natural phenomena. The playing of the Danish National Symphony was truly unbelievable, zeroing in on the fundamentals of the Sibelian sound world in a way that would even make Finnish orchestras green with envy. The tone coloring and dynamics were so precise and so extreme that you can only wonder at how they achieve such results. Dausgaard was equally at home and kept things moving flexibly and quickly (occasionally too much so). With his swift assertive approach, I was reminded of those old recordings from Sibelius's first great champion Robert Kajanus - though Kajanus could only dream of an orchestra this good. All in all this was hardly a perfect concert, but it was a pretty magnificent one which showed amply that Dausgaard and his Danish forces are likely among the most exciting partnerships in the world today.
A

Prom 36: BBC Symphony
Lionel Bringuier Conducting
Berlioz, Chopin, Roussel, Ravel

I'll never forget the day I first saw his name announced as the assistant conductor to Gustavo Dudamel. Bringuier was the first conductor to get international attention who was younger than me. And he wasn't just younger, he was four-and-a-half years younger, closer in age to my brothers than to me. A week later I found out that one friend of mine sent an article about Bringuier to another with the caption "Don't show it to Evan, he might jump out a window." Well....is this kid as talented as all that? Probably, but it's tough to tell in a program like this, because I'm not fond of much of the music on offer here. But even so, the light touch, the elegant sounds, the emphasis on precision and the fleet pacing immediately stamp Bringuier as a certifiably French musician. The overture to Le Corsaire was in every sense, a whirling dervish. Berlioz based it on Lord Byron's autobiographical The Corsair, and if the music does the poem any credit, it shows that Lord Byron was an exceedingly noisy man. Le Corsaire is an exciting piece of music, but it's barely music. There was no attempt in this performance to disguise the lack of substance. The orchestra made joyful noises at an extremely rapid tempo. Then came Chopin's Second Piano Concerto with the underrated Brazillian pianist, Nelson Friere. Much as I love Chopin, I don't care for his piano concertos. The final two movements are always fine, because all Chopin has to do is write an extended piano miniature with orchestral accompaniment. But Chopin was emphatically not a long-form composer, and the opening movements are bloated beyond any reason for what their material can sustain. But Chopin could not have asked for finer advocacy from Nelson Friere. Friere is one of the great living pianists - always spontaneous but never mannered. Nobody can make the opening movements interesting, but Friere phrased the slow movement with Cortotian panache and finale with Rubinsteinian elan. After the break came another work of which I'm none-too-fond. Albert Roussel's Third Symphony is a work that sounds like Prokofiev: great craftsmanship, lots of noise, not much fun, I'm not sure why I'm listening. The performance made some impressive noises, but the piece has simply never spoken to me. Finally, a work I love unequivocally, at least in part. For all its occasional longeurs (except when Charles Munch conducts...), it's one of the sexiest pieces of music ever written. Ravel never made more beautiful sounds, and unlike Prokofiev, Ravel invariably puts his incredible craftsmanship to the service of something deeper than itself. This was a blatantly virtuoso performance with fast tempos and extreme dynamics, it was extremely impressive in its way. Perhaps it was too brash, Munch's tempos without his imagination, but it does show that Bringuier has the chops to bring off a piece this challenging. So let's keep an eye on him.
C+ for my tastes, A- if you take the concert seriously.

Proms 37, 38, 39, 40 Proms Matinees 1 and 2

Alas, work made me miss Bach Day. And nothing about that was more tragic than missing John Eliot Gardiner perform the Brandenburg Concertos. Gardiner has grown as a Bach conductor in recent years, leaving behind his image as a tense and unimaginative martinet in the 1980's where that reputation belongs. He was once a good Bach conductor who had an unfortunate tendency to overlook delicacy. But he is now an old master in Bach who performs with imagination and understanding, fully an equal to the Harnoncourts and the Herreweghes. I also missed most of the BBC Philharmonic's concert with their outgoing conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Noseda does wonderful work, and I was very happy to hear an early Dallapiccola piece before he met serialism. But I didn't finish the piece, so no oracular pronouncements for that either. Then came Prom 40 the next night, featuring my favorite young conductor with the orchestra whose fortunes he's revived as they have not been in many decades. Vladimir Jurowski is 38 and already the undisputed superior of some conductors twice his age. Like most great Russian musicians, he comes with all the passion for which one can ask, but it's coupled with a rare analytical mind. Perhaps Valery Gergiev reaches even more volcanic heights in his chosen repertoire, but Gergiev does not have Jurowski's all-processing brain. Unlike Jurowski, he can neither get inside the head of composers to which he does not relate viscerally, nor does he have the analytical mind to clarify formal relationships. So it's with great regret that I missed half this all-Russian concert, even if the first half didn't quite promise the great things I'd hoped. Jurowski began with a rare (at least, rare these days) outing of Rimsky-Korsakov's rearrangement of Mussorgsky's St. John's Night on Bare Mountain (or Night on Bald Mountain as it's usually known), but Jurowski did Mussorgskian things to the arrangement which Rimsky would never recognize. The playing was uncommonly vivid, with tempos pulled about like taffy. It was an uncommonly dramatic performance of an arrangement that fundamentally exists to take some of the drama away, so I wonder why Jurowski just didn't do the Mussorgsky version. Then out came Julia Fischer to perform Shostakovich's 1st Violin Concerto. I think Shostakovich's 1st Violin Concerto is both one of the all-time great works for the violin, and one of the greatest pieces ever written by Shostakovich. Jurowski's idiomatic accompaniment provided ample evidence of why that is, entering Shostakovich's stark world with all-too-natural aplomb. Unfortunately, Julia Fischer is tempermentally unsuited to the work. Fischer is like a German Hilary Hahn. She's a violinist of enviable intelligence and fearsome technical abilities. But her playing invariably errs on the side of cool delivery. Shostakovich requires a David Oistrakh who can imbue the work with more passion than people ever thought could come out of a violin. Give me Leila Josefowicz or Janine Jansen any day over this. Even so, the orchestral contribution is important enough in this piece that it was entirely worth hearing at any point. Unfortunately this weekend was concert preparation so I didn't have a chance to listen to the second half, which I looked forward to even if I don't like Prokoviev's Third Symphony. Sigh...

Prom 41: London Symphony Orchestra
Valery Gergiev Conducting
Scriabin, Stravinsky

When the partnership was announced, did people actually think that Valery Gergiev and the LSO was a good idea? Really? The LSO is perhaps the single most cosmopolitan orchestra in the world, welcoming guest conductors of every performing style and temperament, and adapting itself perfectly to whatever the conductor wishes. And after its golden period under Colin Davis, they cashed their credit by linking themselves with the biggest name they could find, and that name just happened to be Valery Gergiev - the most unabashedly nationalist conductor in the world. This orchestra, which is known for importing the best specialists from every corner of the repertoire, is now chafing at the idea of having to perform Russian Mahler, Russian Sibelius, Russian Brahms, Russian Berlioz. Meanwhile, the London Philharmonic is enjoying a long-overdue Renaissance because they brought in Vladimir Jurowski - a Russian conductor who is younger than Gergiev, more committed to London than Gergiev, and much more perceptive in non-Russian repertoire than Gergiev. Jurowski will probably never attain Gergiev's superstardom, but he's a far better all-around musician, and anyone should have been able to see what was about to happen. But even so, Gergiev is Gergiev, and when he's on form he is the single most compelling conductor in the world. This program - early Scriabin and Stravinsky, promised to be right up his alley. And so it was, even if perhaps the music let him down. Gergiev began the concert with the Proms premiere of Scriabin's First Symphony a full 110 years after its completion. The reason for the century of delay was immediately apparent: Scriabin was not a long-form composer. His symphony was crammed with wonderful ideas with deliriously suggestive harmonies, impeccably orchestrated, and none of which made sense in relation to one-another. The piece is the token first statement by a young composer of genius who doesn't know when to stop (Sibelius, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Vaughan Williams all had similar problems in their first large-scale pieces). As it was here. Then came Stravinsky's The Firebird...not the suite, the whole darn thing. All 65 minutes of its exquisite late-Romantic bathos. If I'm going to listen to the whole thing, Valery Gergiev had better be the conductor. Fortunately for me, he was. And a work that suffers so badly from Boulez-type clarity was re-shrouded in mystery and sounded like the Jungian psychodrama that it should every time. For people like me, who don't much warm to Stravinsky's cold-shower aesthetics, Gergiev's Stravinsky is a marvel. Stravinsky spent his entire life in the throes of an increasingly successful attempt to divorce himself from all the elements that made his music compelling. His later life should be seen as an attempt to rewrite what his epochal earlier periods were about. Anybody who thinks of Stravinsky as a 'cold' composer should hear his music conducted by Gergiev (or Leonard Bernstein, or Colin Davis, or Michael Tilson Thomas...). Stravinsky would have chafed at the sloppiness of the playing, and even perhaps at the willfulness of the interpretation. But based Stravinsky's relationship with Bernstein, I imagine that Stravinsky would have secretly thrilled to Gergiev's performances even as he insulted him.
B (The Firebird gets an A)