Proms Mini-Reviews 5

Prom 15: BBC Symphony
Oliver Knussen Conducting
Stockhausen, Birtwistle, Luke Bedford, Colin Matthews, Zimmerman, Schumann

Oliver Knussen is a fine musician. He writes extremely dissonant music that can still manage to be charming (he wrote an operatic version of Where The Wild Things Are), and his conducting never fails to have interesting insights into oft-misunderstood pieces. But it often occurs to me that in its way Knussen's insistence on all things avant-garde is a bit like political theorists who still think Communism is the most desireable system after the revelations of the Gulags. Knussen can make atonality sound more reasonable, but he can't make us forget what we already know. His concert began with Karlheinz Stockhausen's Jubilee Overture. It should be said, Stockhausen was hardly a terrible composer, he was merely a raving lunatic who endured terrible childhood traumas and wrote some decent music in his day. But even at his best Stockhausen is monumentally overrated - charmingly eccentric music is touted as prophecies for a new musical epoch. Sadly, this piece is Stockhausen at his most boring: nonsensical patterns scrawled around the score, piles of musical white noise which any listener can place upon whatever meanings they like. That's not music, that's a Rorschach Test. Then came a piece by Harrison Birtwistle called "Sonnance Severance" which was dissonant, loud, and mercifully brief. I enjoy Birtwistle in small doses, he knows how to orchestrate and how to build to climaxes, but his refusal to allow for anything but the most stringent atonality leads to some crippling monotony. This piece was all of three minutes long, and enjoyable for its duration. Afterward came the London premiere of Colin Matthews's Violin Concerto by Canadian violinist Leila Josefowicz. Josefowicz is the polar opposite of her contemporary Hilary Hahn: her playing is full of eruptive fire, it takes enormous risks, and it effortlessly draws the listener in. I have doubts as to whether Colin Matthews's Violin Concerto is a masterpiece, but it is a fine composition and a wonderful vehicle for Josefowicz's overwhelming talents. The piece is not unlike Thomas Ades's violin concerto, lots of dominant suspensions piled one atop the other, but it seems to be done without Ades's genius for organizing them into great paragraphs. After that came Luke Bedford's six-minute "Outblaze the Sky." Far be it for me to say that some composers use 'too many notes,' but the human ear must always have a point of reference in order to make sense the musical content. Without pandering, this piece is far more intelligible than the other two preceding pieces because it's organized around the principle of the 'glissando' (slide), and as the orchestral strings slide from note to note the other instruments intone a series of notes in a single large chord that builds to a climax of real beauty. It is a wonderful piece that I hope we hear many more times, so I'm keeping my ear on Luke Bedford. Then came Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Rhenish Fair Dances. Though fundamentally a German atonalist, Zimmermann was too individual a voice to subscribe to dogma. Like Ligeti, he bristled at the strictures of the Darmstadt School, and was a finer composer than either Stockhausen or Boulez. This piece, like Ligeti's Concert Romanesc, shows the composer as a young man in a far lighter mood than we're accustomed to hearing him. If Concert Romanesc sounds like Bartok in his Balkan folk mode, then the Rhenish Fair Dances equally channel the more Teutonic volk moments in Hindemith. They're small, impish little pieces that take Bavarian folk melodies and put them through all sorts of weird polytonal paces. Finally came Schumann's Rhenish Symphony, and while not without moments of sloppy execution, it was a completely galvanizing performance and in all seriousness perhaps the most understanding performance I've ever heard, with all the German warmth of a Daniel Barenboim performance without Barenboim's droopy tempos. Knussen wisely performed the first movement at top-speed so that we could enjoy the hemiola (three against two) rhythm on which the whole work is based. Knussen followed the metronome markings in each movement as any period performance conductor would have, but with much more vibrant playing than the period crowd ever allows. The Rhenish symphony suddenly achieved a fruitful, glorious life which this problematic work seldom does under less perceptive musicians. This concert is vintage Knussen, an always interesting musician who takes enormous risks, introduces us to unfamiliar repertoire and shows us unfamiliar facets of repertoire we knew backwards. Would that he'd apply himself to better music.
B (Stockhausen gets an F, Bedford, Zimmerman and Schumann all get A+'s)

Prom 17: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons Conducting
Wagner, Beethoven, Dvorak

Has the CBSO done it again? Thirty years ago they hired a little-known Liverpudlian in his mid-twenties to direct them, this unknown turned out to be Sir Simon Rattle. After eighteen fabulous years under Rattle, they hired Sakari Oramo, who only a few years before was an orchestral violinist in Finland and is now the director of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and one of the most underrated conductors in the world. Now that Oramo's gone back to Scandinavia they've hired a thirty-year-old Latvian who until 2008 had only conducted the orchestra at an acoustical tune-up. The world is already ready to proclaim a third miracle in Birmingham, but perhaps I'm a bit more guarded in my optimism. Nelsons is a pupil of the great Latvian maestro Mariss Jansons, Nelsons looks, sounds, and moves almost exactly like his mentor does right down to the same Latvian accented basso on the radio. Nelsons has his mentor's talent for eliciting great orchestral playing, but interpretively Nelsons is far more willful. Jansons is a Bruno Walter for our time, a excellent traditional conductor who gives traditional performances of traditional repertoire. Jansons is very severe (too severe?) in his refusal to indulge in adjustments that diverge from the score, a practice about which Nelsons seems to have few scruples. Jansons didn't become a star until his mid-40's and wasn't a superstar until he turned 60, and that gave him decades to develop his craft away from the spotlight. As a result, there is nothing Jansons does on the podium without considerable forethought. Andris Nelsons is doing everything at once - Bayreuth, Vienna, Dresden, the Met - as though he already has a fully-formed musical personality. The concert began with Wagner's overture to his opera Rienzi, but where was the Wagnerian grandeur? Maybe too much Wagner can make anyone silly, but I missed those massive Wagnerian chords that hit the listener right in the solar plexus, on my laptop (a Toshiba A665 with fabulous speakers by any standard) this orchestra rang as hollowly as a toy orchestra. Critics around the world have already gone wild about Nelson's Wagner, but I'm not yet convinced that we've witnessed the birth of a natural Wagnerian. Then came a characteristically superb performance from - who else? - Paul Lewis, of Beethoven's second piano concerto. Numbering aside, it's really Beethoven's first concerto, and the most Mozartean work Beethoven ever wrote. Lewis plays Beethoven with an astonishing elegance that could easily be transferred to Mozart, and to my delight Nelsons was with him every step of the way. It was every bit as wonderful as Lewis's performance of the first concerto last week. Finally we came to a performance of Dvorak's New World Symphony that was extremely exciting and also a little bit alarming. The slow movement in particular was absolutely magical and showed that Nelsons is a natural musical talent potentially of the Furtwangler/Bernstein level. He obviously has a wonderful feel for inspiring players, setting moods, and creating just the right sound for the right moment. But at the same time as that was an unmistakable sense that mannerisms were creeping in that would be easily solved. There's nothing wrong with pushing tempos around so long as it doesn't distort the musical material (often its necessary just to clarify it), but some of Nelsons's tempo manipulations felt distracting, as did the way in which players phrased the same musical material differently. Many phrases were beautifully formed, but others seemed to go by without a second thought, a practice that would send Mariss Jansons into a rage. Nelsons is obviously a fabulous natural talent capable of giving enormously theatrical performances. He could be a Willem Mengelberg for our time, but like Gustavo Dudamel he's not yet fully formed as a musician, and it would be a terrible mistake to expect too much from him too soon.
B