Category Archives: In concert

Wigmore Mondays: Ilker Arcayürek & Ammiel Bushakevitz – Schubert: The Path of Life

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Ilker Arcayürek (tenor, above), Ammiel Bushakevitz (piano, below)

Schubert
Fischerweise D881 (1826) (2:21 – 5:12)
An Silvia D891 (1826) (5:21 – 8:06)
Der Wanderer an den Mond D870 (1826) (8:21 – 10:32)
Atys D585 (1817) (10:51 – 15:00)
Sei mir gegrüsst D741 (1821-22) (15:20 – 19:20)
Wehmut D772 (1822) 19:46 – 23:10)
Der Wanderer D493 (1816) (23:16 – 28:42)
Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen D343 (1816) (28:47 – 32:20)
Einsamkeit D620 (1818-1822) (34:45 – 52:03)

Wigmore Hall, London; Monday 10 September 2018

You can listen to the BBC Radio 3 broadcast by clicking here

Written by Ben Hogwood

A fascinating anthology of Schubert songs from BBC Radio 3’s New Generation artist, tenor Ilker Arcayürek, and pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz. If you wanted an introduction to the composer’s approach to song in his mid-twenties – sadly towards the end of his short life – then you could hardly ask for better than this.

The performers include songs short and long, bright and downbeat, bringing to the table some of the contrasting moods Schubert uses in his songs, which are surely the crowning glory of his compositional output.

The concert begins with the steady passage of Fischerweise (Fisherman’s Song, 2:21 on the broadcast) – a bright song, full of purpose and with a piano part that burbles like the water. The fisherman’s ‘work gives him vigour’, proclaims von Schlechta’s poetry, and this song is a great way to set the scene.

Following that is An Silvia (5:21), written in the same year of 1826, nicely pointed in this performance with an effortless conversation between singer and piano, exchanging short musical figures. Right from the start of Der Wanderer an den Mond (8:21) a clear story is being told by piano and tenor, leading ultimately to happiness in the major key at the end.

Atys (10:51) is an earlier song and quite urgent, especially when the piano leans provocatively on the more chromatic notes. Meanwhile Sei mir gegrüsst (I greet you, 15:20) is a more languid affair that looks forward towards Schumann, with a highly distinctive and slightly awkward (but highly effective) vocal line.

Wehmut (Melancholy, 19:46) has a solemn piano introduction and ultimately gives way from the joys of spring to the cold regret of winter. In Der Wanderer (23:16) we hear hollow octaves from the piano for dramatic effect at 27:32, where the ‘ghostly breath that calls back to me’ sends shivers down the spine in Arcayürek’s delivery. Then Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen (Litany for the Feast of All Souls, 28:47) explores a lovely major key contrast after the desolation of Der Wanderer’s end.

And so to Einsamkeit (34:45), the remarkable 18-minute song that Schubert expert Graham Johnson cites as the first example of his song cycle writing. Certainly it is a song of epic proportions, a kind of forebear of today’s suite-like progressive rock epics – but also of the song cycle as a whole, as employed not just by Schubert but by Schumann, Mahler and others. While Schubert traverses a wide range of moods and emotions there is still a telling shift at 45:32, where the poet proclaims ‘give me my fill of gloom’, before a dramatic recitative. After this tour de force both performers end in relative contentment given what has gone before.

Perhaps not surprisingly this concert ended with demands for an encore, given Ilker Arcayürek’s clear yet rounded delivery and the extremely responsive piano playing of Ammiel Bushakevitz. They responded with Wandrers Nachtlied II D768 (1822, from 53:35 – 56:13), a lovely bit of space after the tumult of Einsamkeit. It put the seal on a very fine recital indeed – a place to introduce yourself to the Schubert song if you haven’t already done so.

Further listening

Ilker Arcayürek has already recorded a disc of Schubert songs with Simon Leppner for the Champs Hill label, which can be heard on Spotify below:

Only one song from that release was included in this concert – the below playlist contains all the others in versions from leading Schubert interpreters:

Prom 69 – Baiba Skride, Boston SO / Andris Nelsons – Bernstein Serenade & Shostakovich Symphony no.4

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Prom 69 Baiba Skride (violin, below), Boston Symphony Orchestra / Andris Nelsons (above)

Bernstein Serenade (after ‘Symposium’) (1954)
Shostakovich Symphony no.4 in C minor Op.43 (1936)

Royal Albert Hall, Monday 3 September 2018

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

You can listen to this Prom on the BBC Proms website here

The second of the Boston Symphony’s Proms, with its music director Andris Nelsons, offered a pertinent coupling which played to this orchestra’s strengths, while also suggesting that the interpretive insights of this much-lauded partnership are by no means to be taken for granted.

Time was when Bernstein’s Serenade was something of a rarity in live performance, but what is surely its composer’s most successful piece for the concert hall had come into its own well before the onset of his centenary celebrations. This sequence inspired by (though not indebted to) Plato’s consideration of Love in his Symposium was a gift on which Bernstein seized with alacrity, condensing its seven eulogies into five movements such as amount to a varied while cohesive totality to which he aspired without equalling in the concert music of his later years.

Baiba Skride proved a sympathetic exponent, segueing deftly from the lyricism of Phaedrus to the incisiveness of Pausanias and savouring the whimsical irony of Aristophanes. The fussiness of Erixymachus was pertly done and eloquence of Agathon not unduly emotive, for all its expansiveness; the finale almost achieving unity in the rumination of Socrates as overtaken by the ebullience of Alcibiades. Nelsons secured an engaging response from the reduced strings, while keeping some over-effusive percussion writing within sensible limits.

A pity that the sizable audience was not ideally attentive, suggesting that Bernstein as concert composer was less to its liking than when in ‘musical’ mode. It seemed rather more focussed for Shostakovich’s Symphony no.4 – an era-defining piece kept under wraps for a quarter-century after its completion, before gradually making its way into the 20th-century repertoire where it has been ever since. Subversive and despairing in equal measure, it duly received a commanding account where the BSO conveyed both visceral power and fastidious ensemble.

Were these the deciding factors of a great performance, this would assuredly have been one. Yet behind the formidable technical façade was a lack of empathy with this most emotionally charged of symphonies, not least a first movement whose stark alternations of Stravinskian energy and Mahlerian anguish Nelsons drew into a formally unified if expressively uniform whole. With its subtler pivoting between anxiety and elegance, the central intermezzo was finely rendered, even if its closing percussion ostinato was neither sardonic nor speculative.

Come the finale and Nelsons found an ideal tempo for its opening funeral march, though its overtones of heroism and plangency felt passed over on the way into a toccata section which lacked cumulative intensity for all its incisiveness. The ensuing divertimento gave several of the orchestra’s principals their moment in the spotlight that they took with panache, then the entry of duelling timpani was clumsily prepared going into a peroration as was imposing but never inexorable; the postlude which follows one of somnolence rather than numbed despair.

As so often this season, there was no encore – Nelsons purposely extending the silence at the close of the Shostakovich as its own epitaph. It set the seal on a lucidly conceived and superbly executed reading that yet missed out on what makes this piece an experience like few others.

BBC Proms: BBC Singers / Sakari Oramo – Songs of Farewell and Laura Mvula premiere

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Proms at the Cadogan Hall: BBC Singers (above) / Sakari Oramo (below)

Bridge Music, when soft voices die (1907)
Vaughan Williams Rest (1902)
Holst Nunc dimittis (1915)
Laura Mvula Love Like A Lion (2018, world premiere)
Parry Songs of Farewell (1913-15)

Cadogan Hall, Monday 20 August 2018

You can listen to this Prom by clicking here The times given on this page refer to the starting times on the broadcast itself

Reviewed by Ben Hogwood

Over the last couple of decades the Monday lunchtime strand of the BBC Proms concerts have gone from strength to strength, and the 2018 season looks like being an especially good vintage. English song has fared particularly well, and on the heels of Dame Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton’s imaginative recital, here was a choral selection based around rest, sleep and departure.

To be more specific, the form of rest composers Bridge, Vaughan Williams, Holst and Parry had in mind was the Eternal form. Frank Bridge wrote Music when soft voices die (from 1:49 on the broadcast) as his entry for a magazine competition, Vaughan Williams set the text of Rest (6:33) as a deeply felt short song, while Gustav Holst’s setting of the Nunc Dimittis (10:49), made in 1915, was resurrected for publication by his daughter Imogen in 1979.

Pride of place, however, went to Sir Hubert Parry’s Songs of Farewell, one of the crowning glories of his output. Rarely performed as a cycle, this series of unaccompanied motets, completed late in the composer’s life and in the shadow of the First World War, marks some of Parry’s deepest thoughts on mortality. They are every bit as profound in today’s world as they would have been then, and an attentive audience in the Cadogan Hall evidently took plenty from this interpretation.

Sakari Oramo has experience as a choral conductor but this was his first outing with the BBC Singers. He led them in a direct, unfussy manner, shaping the phrases while recognising this experienced group already have the tools at their disposal to make a beautiful sound.

Parry constructed the cycle so that his part writing gains density as the songs unfold, moving from four parts through to eight by the final Lord, let me know thine end.
Oramo took us on that progression with a gradual increase of intensity, helped by purity of tone and unanimity of voice. My soul, there is a country (29:09) began as a lighter, thoughtful account, building in intensity, the parts moving closely together. I know my soul hath power to know all things (32:53) was notable as much for its expressive pauses between words, Oramo’s direction ensuring a tight-knit ensemble. Some of Parry’s musical phrases are of considerable length, but the BBC Singers took them in their stride.

The density grew, from five parts (the beautiful Never weather-beaten sail, 38:35) to six (There is an old belief, ) then seven (a hypnotic account of All round the earth’s imagined corners, 43:15) to ultimately eight (Lord, let me know mine end, 50:04). This was the apex of the performance, notable for its calm acceptance of the final days of life, and in the closing pages the BBC Singers portrayed Parry facing his ultimate departure with an incredibly moving dignity.

The whole concert was structured rather like the Parry cycle, beginning from the small but poignant songs from Vaughan Williams and Bridge. The BBC Singers were excellent, with beautiful phrasing, and a surprise was in store for the Holst. Often the Nunc Dimittis is a softly voiced counterpoint to the Magnificat, but this one grew from small beginnings to become a forceful statement, delivered with impressive surety.

And so to Laura Mvula’s three-part work Love Like A Lion (12:58), written to a commission by the BBC but charting rest and loss in a rather different way. The loss here was a relationship, causing intense pain in Like A Child but with acceptance given in I Will Nor Die (For Him) (20:30), with a penetrating solo from Helen Neeves (21:08) over a gently undulating accompaniment that took us to a special, faraway place. Free from restrictions, Love Like a Lion itself (23:46) revelled in its new freedom, as did Sakari Oramo – who knows Mvula well from their Birmingham days. Love Like A Lion showed her ease with choral writing, and was a deeply expressive voyage from darkness to light. Hopefully we will hear more from her very soon.

Ask the Audience at the BBC Proms – Michael Hubbard on the CBSO concert of Debussy, Ravel & Lili Boulanger

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For the latest in Arcana’s Ask The Audience series musicOMH editor Michael Hubbard gives his verdict on the City of Birmingham Orchestra and their Prom of French music.

Prom 31: Inon Barnatan (piano), Minnesota Orchestra / Osmo Vänskä

Debussy Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894)
Lili Boulanger Psalm 130 ‘Du fond de l’abîme’ (1914-17)
Debussy Nocturnes (1897-99)
Ravel Boléro (1928)

Royal Albert Hall, Wednesday 15 August 2018

You can listen to this Prom on the BBC iPlayer here

ARCANA: Michael, how would you describe your musical upbringing?

There was always a guitar hanging in the lounge, as my father learnt a bit in the 1960s. He used to play things like Islands In The Sun, and then my mother would say “That’s enough!” and hang it up again. When I was in infant school, like anybody else, recorders became a fixture in my life. I had a descant, a tenor and a treble at various points. I never got round to the bass, only one person had that, maybe because her parents were richer.

In terms of the music I used to listen to, that was something else entirely. My mother was deaf, but she could somehow pick out some music more than others. She passed some of that on to me, and some of that was the opera side – especially Puccini – but there was music from King Sunny Adé through to Tina Turner, too. My father’s music taste could be discerned a little from what he used to play on guitar. When I was a little older I was able to go through his music and play some of it, from Johnny Cash to Abba. I know my mother’s teenage fixation was Elvis Presley. So although I had no formal music knowledge before I started learning an instrument, there was I suppose a lot of music around – but I had to look for it.

When were you first aware of classical music?

I was doing things in school, music class – and starting to pick up names like Purcell. When I started flute lessons at the age of 11, more of those composers became names to me, but up until then it was essentially things I heard on the radio. I had very little knowledge at that time.

Name three musical acts you love and why:

I could probably name about 300 and they’d change every time I tried to answer… so this will be the first three that come to mind.

Jean-Michel Jarre was a massive hero of my early teens. He is probably the main reason why the first musical instrument I was really interested in was the synth. I was self taught; when my grandmother died she said in her will, ‘he must have a keyboard’, and my mother stuck to that. She brought me the keyboard I wanted, a Yamaha PSS-680, with its mini keys. I went on to Korgs and Rolands after that, and eventually had a couple of years of piano lessons, which supplemented the flute tuition I’d been persevering with. Knowing my way round a synth – and covering Jarre tracks with it – opened the door to composition, and before long I’d written some rudimentary pieces. I could never have done that with just a flute, on my own – the synth allowed me to play everything. Like Jarre. His enormous Fairlights were of course a world away from my Yamaha, but here was a doorway through which I wished to step.

There was also a sense of drama in what Jarre was doing, it was like ‘I’m taking over Docklands for a concert’, or ‘I’m taking over a space shuttle launch site’. I loved that, that everything stopped because music was that important. The very idea he was putting out there was ‘I AM – LOOK’. The idea that drama could be a thing that is art – something you could express from yourself as opposed to someone scripting it for you, it could be you creating it, and you could take over the whole district of a city with your lights and your sound – was amazing to me. I had videos of the Docklands concert and Rendezvous Houston. I think they helped me become aware that hiding in the corner in the hope of never being seen was a life strategy that I’d already taken too far.

Another very big influence on my life was Erasure. Vince Clarke was composing on guitar but transferring his ideas across to synth. I think I’d pigeonholed synths and guitars in different worlds until I understood his process. You composed on one or the other, and that instrument of composition would then define your music and your artistic statement. Nonsense, of course. 1984 was for me a pivotal year as I discovered the UK Top 40 on Radio 1 and its visual highlights on Top Of The Pops. The charts were, it quickly became apparent, full of gays – as well as (half of) Erasure, there was Pet Shop Boys, Culture Club, and especially Frankie Goes To Hollywood; the list went on.

Through them and their conduit, the BBC, I became aware of a larger world. Andy Bell could appear in gold lamé hotpants to sing Sometimes on prime-time BBC1 and millions of our countrymen – not least my parents – would watch. I began to realise that we probably reacted differently to this performance. With my age still in single figures, the lyrical meaning of Frankie‘s Relax, I confess, passed me by – but Erasure’s songs, beginning with the chorus of Sometimes, had me analysing and reanalysing all sorts of assumptions. It marked at least the beginning of an awakening.

I’d already bought my first album on cassette tape, but my first CD album was for someone of my age not an obvious choice – Delirium by Capercaillie. En route to America for the first time, I was in a duty free shop with my father. He’d been concerned I wouldn’t have enough to occupy me on the plane, and took me into a shop and get me an album to listen to. I could choose from whatever was there. I can’t think what caused me to choose Capercaillie – I didn’t then know the band was named after a bird, or anything about their music. I did know they were Scottish, having scanned the sleeve notes, and somehow I’d lasted this long on the planet without owning any music by Scots, despite most of my family hailing from north of the border. Maybe it was a curiosity to hear if we’d have a shared connection.

Delirium merged synth sounds with their Gaelic folk music, and the latter was an otherworldly thing to my ears – I had no idea what those lyrics were about. I listened to the reels and jigs, and I wanted to listen to more of them. By extension from there started to listen more broadly to folk music. Capercaillie’s Delirium is not pure folk, but they are steeped in its traditions, and it opened that world up to me and gave me landmarks to mark the course of exploration.

The Proms does that too. You go along to see something that, as a piece of sheet music written hundreds of years ago, could be stultifying, but actually it’s alive because people are on stage and giving their own interpretations – like tonight’s Prom, with the trombonist in the orchestra in Boléro.

What did you think of the music in tonight’s Prom?

It was my first time ever hearing Boléro live, although like most people I expect I know it very well. It was my first time hearing anything by Debussy live, and had never heard anything by Lili Boulanger. I’ll work back, because I have Boléro in my mind at the moment.

I think it’s a pivotal piece of music. It’s not that exciting because once you’ve heard it you know where it goes, but that’s also true of most trance singles released on Positiva at the turn of the century. It’s a dance music track in embryonic minimalist form, building layers, reshaping loops, falling back. It’s also a pop music track because it’s instantly memorable. And it’s a classical music track because it uses an orchestra – it’s many different things. I want to know how it affects the broader world beyond classical, not if it was too fast or too slow, or which genre it neatly fits into. It’s probably not Ravel’s best in his own mind, but it’s certainly his big crossover hit from beyond the grave.

With Debussy I found myself not focusing on the musicians, but drifting. Not that it was bad, but I think that’s what it was about. I started thinking of other images the music was putting in my mind, in a way that Boléro didn’t. The first piece (the Prélude à L’apres-midi d’un faune) I thought was better at doing that than the Nocturnes. It was a nice warm-up, and I could see why it was first. Nobody stood out, it was a piece that brought everybody together. There was one thing happening organically. I couldn’t sing you a note of it now, but it engendered thoughts of other things.

With the Boulanger I found it very quiet, despite everything on stage – which felt like a choice that the performers had decided to restrain things. I thought that was odd.

What was your experience of the arena compared to elsewhere in the Royal Albert Hall?

For the Debussy I think I would rather have been sat down, but not for Boléro. It was odd to be standing up for classical, I would have expected to sit down and would rather do that I think.

Verdict: A qualified SUCCESS, even more so with seats!

Prom 44 – CBSO Choruses & Orchestra / Ludovic Morlot – Debussy, Ravel & Lili Boulanger

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Prom 44 Justina Gringytė (mezzo-soprano), CBSO Youth Chorus, CBSO Chorus, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Ludovic Morlot (above)

Debussy Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894)
Lili Boulanger Psalm 130 ‘Du fond de l’abîme’ (1914-17)
Debussy Nocturnes (1897-99)
Ravel Boléro (1928)

Royal Albert Hall, Wednesday 15 August 2018

Reviewed by Ben Hogwood Photo of CBSO (c) Upstream Photography

You can listen to this Prom on the BBC Proms website here

One of the BBC Proms’ most valuable undertakings this season is the music of Lili Boulanger (1893-1918). Her biggest choral work, a setting of Psalm 130 (Du fond de l’abîme) was the centrepiece of this enchanting concert from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Ludovic Morlot.

For once the Royal Albert Hall acoustic was ideally suited to the instrumentation of a piece, especially with the amount of detail lit up by this particular interpretation. Beginning with organ and lower strings that seemed to be positioned somewhere underground near the loading bay, the piece grew assuredly in stature and emotion, finding the nub of its text. The assembled throng of the CBSO Chorus sang as one, shaping Boulanger’s phrases beautifully while enjoying the harmonic twists and turns that give this piece – completed a year before its composer’s death – a distinctively modern turn.

Boulanger (above) was a friend of Debussy but had a tragically short-lived existence, dying from complications of illness at the age of 24. In that brief time she had already served notice as a composer of considerable invention, deep emotion and the ability to extend colour, harmony and melody in particular. All these things were on show in Psalm 130, the performance notable for its exquisite brush strokes.

The only problem was a difficulty in following the text itself from the arena. Although the right notes were undoubtedly there from the chorus, and mezzo-soprano Justina Gringytė was full of tone in her solo passages, the words themselves were difficult to grasp above the texture. Some of the blame for this could go to the Royal Albert Hall acoustic itself – and it certainly wasn’t at the expense of a quite wonderful piece that should occupy a much firmer place in the repertoire.

For the rest of the programme Morlot and his charges gave us popular Debussy and Ravel, beginning in the heat haze of Prélude à l’apres-midi d’un faune and ending with the minimalist Boléro. These pieces were fascinating to contrast, from Marie-Christine Zupancic’s languorous flute solo that led off the Debussy – beautifully played – to the insistent, temple-knocking side drum of Adrian Spillett in the ubiquitous Boléro. Morlot paced both to perfection, giving us a chance in the Ravel to indulge in Matthew Knight’s trombone solo but also bringing out the Spanish rhythms and colour that make the piece a riot. He brought percussion section leader Spillett to the stage for a well-deserved curtain call at the end.

Before Boléro we were treated to the exquisite Nocturnes of Debussy – which would have been even more exquisite were it not for a barrage of coughing around the hall. Still, that did not completely harm a sensuously shaded account of Nuages (Clouds), the first Nocturne, whose softly oscillating chords left their understated mark, before the second and much quicker Fêtes (Festivals) ran lightly on its feet. The central procession episode of this pictorial movement was brilliantly paced by Morlot, with a hallucinogenic effect achieved through to muted trumpets, distant horns and wide open string textures.

While these two movements were special the concluding Sirènes (Sirens) was bewitching, fusing women’s voices and orchestra in an innovative combination that predates Holst’s The Planets by some 20 years. The CBSO Youth Choir were superb here, singing as one and hitting the high notes without fear – and without compromising the colour Debussy so clearly strives for. Morlot portrayed the vast, wide open scope of the sea – but also seemed to be looking beyond, casting his gaze far into space. This worked extremely well in the Royal Albert Hall, though perhaps quelling the coughers at the end was an even greater achievement!

This was an inspirational Prom, giving us familiar classics and the relatively unknown, boosting the profile of Lili Boulanger while reasserting the claims of Debussy and Ravel to be masters of their field. French classical music at its finest.