Proms Mini-Reviews #6

Prom 17: Scottish Chamber Orchestra Winds
Douglas Boyd Conducting
Dvorak and Mozart


This was to be Sir Charles Mackerras's second and final Prom of the season, and had he been able to go on a little while longer he couldn't have picked better music with which to exit. Anybody who's never heard Mozart's 'Gran Partita' is missing out, but most people have heard it without knowing it as it's his famous Serenade for Winds which Salieri describes so memorably in Amadeus. Even by the standards of Mozart, it's a miracle. But before that came Dvorak's Serenade for Winds, which he wrote as a complementary piece to Mozart's when he was still very young. Dvorak's essay isn't on Mozart's level, but it gives just as much pleasure as anything else written by this most natural and human of composers. Some composers - Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Bizet, Dvorak, Faure, Vaughan Williams, Poulenc, Ned Rorem...to say nothing of Kander & Ebb, Duke Ellington, Van Morrison, Sam Cooke, The Beach Boys, Otis Redding, The Beatles, and Louis Armstrong - express themselves so directly that the simple act of listening to their music without contemplating any meaning gives overwhelming pleasure. Maybe Sir Charles would have given the rhythms a bit more spring, but it was perfectly enjoyable under Doug Boyd - who was also the principal oboe of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe before becoming a conductor. But Sir Charles's absence was keenly felt in the Mozart, a masterful piece that needs the hand of a master. A few years ago the conductorless London Mozart Players gave a reading of this piece which I will never forget, every note well-placed, every phrase thought through to build upon what preceded it. This performance was not conductorless, but far it was far more characterless. The piece can work equally well in a variety of interpretations, but the players have to bring commitment and fervor to however they choose to play it. In this performance, phrases were lobbed off with all the care of a dorm room slob. It was a routine performance, and no composer exposes the rote more mercilessly than Mozart does. If only we could have heard Sir Charles in this music, that would have been pleasure as only Mozart can give.
C+


Prom 18: Australian Youth Orchestra
Sir Mark Elder Conducting
Brett Dean, Mahler, Shostakovich


It really is amazing that so many countries are able to round up their best young musicians for orchestral training. The Australian Youth Orchestra is yet another country where the young players can be put through an intensive program so that they can emerge with the ability to compete on the world market with the very best from everywhere else. Where do they get the money for these things? In any event, for this concert they were conducted by Sir Mark Elder who is quickly becoming one of British music's most venerable institutions. Having put the Halle Orchestra of Manchester on the map with its greatest period since the legendary 27-year tenure of Sir John Barbirolli, and having done similar things before at the English National Opera, he is poised to take his place with Sir Simon Rattle and Tony Pappano at the forefront of British conductors. But even the best don't hit it out of the park every time (as we Americans say), and this concert with the Australian Youth Orchestra was nearly as dull as concerts get. The prom began with the London premiere of Australian composer Brett Dean's Amphitheatre. In recent years, Brett Dean has become the undisputed composer laureate of contemporary Australia. But in a previous life he was a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic, and before that he was principal violist of the Australian Youth Orchestra, a tenure during which he played under Mark Elder in his previous performance with the orchestra. The piece has many fine ideas, but it jumps from one to the next without fully exploring how to develop them. It did, however, seem to be excellently played by the AYO. Following that was a performance of six songs from Mahler's cycle: Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Young Russian mezzo Ekatrina Gubanova had a voice much too shrill for Mahler's music and sounded indifferent to interpretive nuance. Elder's Mahler conducting could only be described as 'too goyish.' It is wooden conducting, unsympathetic to the inflections Mahler needs. Judging by this effort Sir Mark, who can be so perceptive in Wagner and Elgar, doesn't seem to 'get' Mahler. And yet, there was still a Shostakovich 10 with memorable attributes. The 10th, one of Shostakovich's greatest works in a career of masterpieces, is not a work that easily yields its secrets. With it's brutal violence sandwiched between endless stretches of deliberate longueurs, it requires the hands of only the very best to be brought to life. For those reasons, I generally prefer my Shostakovich fast and fierce and I think Shostakovich did too, but Mark Elder never ceases to amaze me at his ability to sustain tension at the slowest possible tempo. In Elder's hands, the usually twenty-minute first movement was a full five minutes longer, yet Elder had these young musicians playing with the most fragile control in quiet dynamics. In its own way it was an incredibly impressive feat of musicmaking, but this movement is far too long to be able to withstand such treatment without getting bored of it even from the very best conductors. And unfortunately, the playing was not matched by equal commitment in the loud sections, which generally sounded far too refined to be healthy for any youth orchestra. Perhaps we could get the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra to fill in for them in the loud passages. The rest of the symphony continued in much the same way. Certain passages sounded wonderful, but they were intermittent throughout whole parts of the symphony that sounded listless and tired.
D+


Proms Chamber Music #2
Navarra Quartet and pianist Francesco Piemontesi
Debussy, Haydn, Schumann


Originally this prom was supposed to showcase the interestingly named Finnish quartet, Meta4. Unfortunately the cellist took ill, and Meta4 cancelled their proms debut. In their place came the debut of a young British quartet named the Navarra Quartet. Not that the replacement gig was tough, it consisted of filling in on two repertoire chestnuts. Before the quartet was due to come onstage, young Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi gave us some bravura renderings of four Debussy preludes. Piemontesi played with enormous expressive freedom and charisma, perhaps it was the type of playing that seems better suited to Liszt at first-glance, but it was tremendously exciting pianism all the same in some of the greatest works ever written for the instrument. Then came a performance of Haydn's String Quartet op. 20 no. 3 - one of Haydn's darkest works from his Sturm und Drang period, it is one of Haydn's most difficult quartets to bring off in performance because of its many odd quirks in construction. The Navarra Quartet's approach sounded too careful by half, with tempos and dynamics that were the last word in moderation in a piece that demands Beethovenian contrast. Even with this extremely cautious approach, they caught the oddities in this quartet only inconsistently, with noticeable lapses in ensemble. Things finally woke up in the final movement, but by then it was too late to rescue the performance. Then came a performance of Schumann's equally difficult Piano Quintet that brought to mind an image of the pianist dragging the string quartet along kicking and screaming into taking some risks. The whole ensemble had a fantastic sense of the same ebb and flow that Piemontesi brought to the Debussy, but which the Navarra Quartet lacked almost entirely in the Haydn. It was a performance that was romantic in the best sense of the word, with lots of flexibility but always within the parameters of the piece's structure. The result was still perhaps a bit small-scale, but far better than the Haydn.
B (Navarre quartet gets a C, Piemontesi gets an A+, this kid's going places)