Prom 22: BBC Symphony
Jonathan Nott Conducting
Mozart, Ligeti, George Benjamin, Ravel
Jonathan Nott is probably too intelligent, too curious and too self-effacing to be a great conductor. His music-making seems far too aware of the risks involved in great performances to take them. His concerts almost invariably look better on paper than they are in practice. The performances are invariably polished and well-organized, the programs are intelligent in the extreme, and yet you're left wondering how a person can be so intelligent and yet miss the essential element of what makes music worth experiencing. The concert began with a performance by Pierre-Laurent Aimard as a pianist, the perfect counterpart to Nott - who can make sense of the thorniest avant-garde pieces yet sound totally adrift in Bach and Schumann. They performed Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 - his last - in a matter that suggested nothing so much as Mozart played with kid gloves. There was no sense of fun or play, just the sense that two musicians wanted to contribute as little personality to the proceedings as possible. The result was curiously quaint, like those old-fashioned romantic performances by Karl Bohm and Walter Gieseking that created a perception of Mozart as a composer of sweet ditties. This was followed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing a solo Ligeti piece: the Musica Ricercata no. 2 - made famous by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut leading straight without applause into the London Premiere of George Benjamin's Duet for Piano and Orchestra. The change in character was immediate. Aimard's playing, which sounded confused and board by Mozart's simple cadences, sounded engaged and wholly convinced by this more complex fare. Even so, there are passages in the Benjamin piece of very sparse simplicity, and yet Aimard sounds wholly sympathetic to Benjamin's simplicity in a way he doesn't to Mozart's. I wouldn't call Banjamin's piece a masterwork, but it's still a pretty remarkable piece of writing in its way. What I find amazing about Benjamin is that he is able to extract music that is as interesting as it is without surrendering even momentarily to the lure of tonal contrasts. The concert resumed after the interval with an ingeniously-constructed snippet of Ravel looking toward Viennese culture in two separate pieces. Nott's fastidiousness dovetails well with Ravel's, and he was in his element, but I can't escape the feeling that these are not the Ravel pieces for which he's best equipped. It began with an elegant performance of the Valses nobles et sentimentales that was quite pleasant if hardly the last word in excitement, and it ended with a lucid performance of La Valse that was forthright, brought out lots of inner voicing and made all the right noises. But it was all a bit austere, this is Ravel without the blue suggestiveness, Munch and Monteux wouldn't have seen the point. But between the two works was sandwiched a pointilistic movement from Miroirs which Nott approached like a master builder and created enormous excitement out of pure musical craft. What was missing from all this was the Ravelian charisma, the whiff of sensuality without which Ravel retains the arid precision of a swiss clock. And as enjoyable as clocks can be, Ravel without the sex is just not as fun.
B-
Prom 23: BBC Scottish Symphony
Donald Runnicles Conducting
John Foulds, Vaughan Williams, Elgar
The shock that Donald Runnicles has returned to Edinburgh is still with the music world. It is so rare to see a major maestro exhibit loyalty to his hometown that lots of people were plainly puzzled by his motivations at choosing what seemed to many like a step down the career ladder. But it's clear that Runnicles's principle motivation was to return home, and perhaps to give Scotland it's first authentically great orchestra. After year one, the results are impressive, while still remaining a work very much in progress. The concert began in a manner impressive in its own way. John Foulds's rediscovered piano concerto, the Dynamic Triptych, is one of the cornerstones of the very recent revival of this English composer who has known only neglect since his death seventy years ago. But the little I've heard of Foulds's music is frankly not very interesting. Like Alexander Scriabin, Foulds uses harmonies very creatively and like Scrabin his new ideas are probably born out of a lifelong fascination with eastern mysticism. But unlike his Russian contemporary Foulds seems to have very little idea how to put these harmonies together into a meaningful musical paragraph. The result sounds a bit like musical traction - a composer who doesn't know how to keep his pieces moving. The performers, including pianist Ashley Wass, sounded as though they did the best they could with limited raw materials. This piece was followed by two works written by a composer who clearly knew how to create meaningful musical paragraphs. Vaughan Williams is very much the great composer Foulds is clearly not, and any occasion to hear his gorgeous Serenade to Music - the piece by the way with which I made my non-college conducting debut...I was a little too ambitious no doubt - is not an occasion to listen idly. During the broadcast Runnicles spoke with great eloquence about how understated this piece is. But there was something a little too understated about the proceedings, the performance lacked a measure of that high-Victorian lushness and pomp which makes the piece so much fun. The soloists, from Scotland's Royal Academy of Music and Drama, sounded far more impressive as a group than as individuals. It was simply a disappointing performance. But a different performance materialized after the interval, beginning with the much-heralded debut of young Scottish violinist/pinup Nicola Benedetti. Concerns that Benedetti is a more photogenic phenomenon than artistic are unfounded, and she gave us a reading of RVW's The Lark Ascending that will not be easily forgotten. It's arguable that such a high-calorie sound as the one she makes on the violin is not appropriate for Vaughan Williams, but her playing was unfailingly passionate. The concert concluded with a dramatic though not quite searing performance of Elgar's First Symphony. Runnicles is an unfailingly visceral musician for whom passion is at least as important as intellect, so he and Elgar would seem like a natural fit. The performance had wonderful parts, but Runnicles seemed uncomfortable with Elgar's rambling discursiveness and the weak sections of the performance stood in marked relief to its strong passages. The scherzo, taken at a seemingly impossible clip, was thrilling and the slow movement had visceral passion in abundance but the outer movements sounded listless and longwinded. A disappointing concert all told, but there's still plenty of hope yet for this partnership and there's always Mahler....
C+
Prom 24: BBC Scottish Symphony
Donald Runnicles Conducting
Mahler 3
I ought to confess that I wasn't much looking forward to this performance. I remember a performance of Donald Runnicles with the BBC Symphony in a lethally dull Mahler's Das Lied von Der Erde. It was worrisome that a conductor so persuasive in so many other German composers couldn't seem to get a handle around the greatest of all symphonists. But I needn't have been concerned because Runnicles was very much in his element in this huge, Wagnerian symphony. Like Wagner's Ring, Mahler 3 is a world in itself, a gargantuan epic which Mahler fills with as many different states as creation can contain. His invention was never as ripe as it was in this symphony and it comes to us without the fatalism of his later works. For me, much as I love everything by Mahler, the third and the fourth symphonies are his greatest pieces, the closest he ever came to the human universality of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Any performance that captures even a portion of Mahler's enormously vivid world is pleasure worth making enormous sacrifices to hear, and even if Runnicles isn't yet quite among the greatest interpreters of this most challenging score (Bernstein, Haitink, Gielen, Horenstein, Abbado, Levine, Kubelik...my personal list obviously) he sank his teeth into it with relish. Right from the beginning, it was clear that the players had few scruples about making the most of Mahler's most outrageous sounds. In the hands of unsympathetic conductors this movement can seem positively droopy, but Runnicles took the march sections at a heady Kubelikesque clip and the movement's full 35-minute outrageousness came to us in Technicolor. Another highlight of the performance was the incisive second movement, which was performed faster and far more dynamically than usual. Finally, this movement was much more like a sardonic Mahlerian phantasmagoria than the twee-and-cutesy way in which it's often performed. The third movement scherzo, perhaps my single favorite movement in all of Mahler, was a bit less satisfactory. The BBCSSO didn't play at the same level of character and Runnicles seemed to be pulling the tempos in the wrong direction (gradually slowing down rather than speeding up a la Leonard Bernstein), but the famous post-horn solo was wonderfully evocative - with Runnicles admirably refusing the temptation to linger on it. The vocal movements also had some problems, with playing that was too loud to be evocative in the Nietzsche movement and a tempo that was simply too fast for the Knaben Wunderhorn setting. But the contralto, Karen Carghill was a real contralto (for once) and the chorus sang with admirable clarity, if not enough exuberance. The performance ended with a breathtaking reading of the final slow movement. Runnicles coaxed a huge range of color, dynamics and tempo variation out of the players, and it was easily one of the finest readings of the last movement I've ever heard (notwithstanding a doozy of a trumpet crack in the extremely difficult brass chorale at the end). One day soon, these forces may be capable of giving a reading of this piece for the ages. As it stands now, not bad Scots, not bad at all.
B+
Prom 25: London Sinfonietta
David Atherton Conducting
Bach, Stravinsky
I suppose this concert was objectively excellent in programming and playing. But it would not be to everybody's taste, and I'm pretty sure it's not to mine. This was Bach and Stravinsky at their most dogmatic, and meeting each other on common ground that both should have avoided. I know, I know, speaking ill of Bach is sacrilege, but even a Bach-lover (and who isn't?) has to admit that the music gets dry all too often. There is much more than enough by Bach that I love to feel comfortable saying this: I can only listen to so much counterpoint before I start getting nostalgic for Puccini. The Organ Variations on Von Himmel Hoch are no doubt an unimpeachable technical achievement, but who cares? After a while counterpoint becomes a technical exercise with no identity or personality. Stravinsky's variations on Von Himmel Hoch are more to my liking, at least there were contrasting techniques between each variation. But this is hardly top-drawer Stravinsky, unfortunately nor is anything else from the final two decades of his life (though The Flood comes closer). No amount of critical theory can contradict what my ears tell me, and my ears tell me that Stravinsky's willingness to bow before prevailing trends proved fatal to his music towards the end of his life. Stravinsky's late choral work, Threni, is a work filled with pleasures so exquisitely ascetic that I can't feel them. The piece showed that Stravinsky still had some rhythmic vitality, but his insistence on working within a serialist framework drained Stravinsky of his ability to create those incredibly unique harmonies that give the rhythms such incredible spring. What we heard at this concert was two great musical geniuses at their most dogmatic and inhuman. Now I'll reward myself for not shutting this off by listening to Turandot.
D+
No comments:
Post a Comment