Category Archives: In concert

The Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra and Stéphane Denève in Beethoven, Guillaume Connesson and Respighi

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brussels-philharmonicBrussels Philharmonic Orchestra (above, picture courtesy of Samsung)

Richard Whitehouse on a visit from the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra and their chief conductor to the Cadogan Hall, offering a rare chance to hear the music of Guillaume Connesson.

Cadogan Hall, Thursday 29 September 2016

Beethoven Symphony No. 6 ‘Pastoral’ (1808)

Connesson Flammenschrift (Letters of Fire) (2012); E chiaro nella valle il fiume appare (And clear in the valley the river appears) (2015)

Respighi Pini di Roma (1924)

Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra / Stéphane Denève

This evening’s concert brought a welcome visit from the Brussels Philharmonic and current music director Stéphane Denève, his advocacy of new music evident in the inclusion of two recent pieces by Guillaume Connesson which were performed on either side of the interval.

Now in his mid-40s, this French composer conjures a wide range of influences from François Couperin, via Wagner and Strauss, to Dutilleux and the film music of Bernard Herrmann and John Williams (a pity the programme book included no biography either of Connesson or the orchestra – while being dominated by an absorbing if, in context, overly detailed note on the Beethoven).

These pieces are the first two parts of a symphonic trilogy, with Flammenschrift both an evocation of Beethoven and a tribute to the ‘golden age’ of Germanic music. Strauss does indeed make a fleeting appearance during the more lyrical central episode; otherwise, it is the incisive neo-classicism of Honegger that comes most readily to mind, with the relentless rhythmic drive generating an impetus maintained right through to the effervescent final pages.

Taking its title from lines by the early nineteenth-century poet Giacomo Leopardi, E chiaro nelle valle il fiume appare is ostensibly the slow movement of this sequence – its alternately ethereal and passionate manner recalling the later music of Roussel (notably the Adagio from the Third Symphony), with Connesson proving hardly less adept in controlling the expressive momentum of music such as borders on without quite spilling over into overkill. Presumably the questioning tone on which it ends is answered by Maslenitsa, the final part of this trilogy.

Make no mistake, Connesson is a composer in which formal security is allied to an orchestral sense of considerable flamboyance. Interesting that, along with older contemporaries such as Nicolas Bacri, he should draw inspiration from an earlier era of French music – bypassing the serial complexity of Boulez or the harmonic intricacy of Grisey or Murail. Accessible without being facile, his music may yet gain regular hearings here, and there could be no doubting the conviction with which orchestra and conductor presented it to tonight’s appreciative audience.

Nor was the Brussels orchestra found wanting in the familiar works which opened and closed proceedings. A viable first half in itself, Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony did not fit into its present context: Denève secured a fluent if rarely insightful reading, as its best in an animated take on the first movement and appealingly jaunty scherzo, but there was a lack of inwardness and repose elsewhere; while an almost complete absence of vibrato from the strings gave their playing an unyielding quality emphasized by the forward ambience of the Cadogan acoustic.

More successful overall was Respighi’s Pines of Rome, the second and most enduring part of a ‘Roman triptych’ by which he remains best known to posterity. Denève found humour amid the frenzy of the ‘Villa borghese’ then drama in the sombre musings ‘near a Catacomb’. The sensuousness of the ‘Janiculum’ saw an amusing cameo from the percussionist operating the gramophone record of a nightingale, whereas the crescendo of the ‘Appian Way’ brought a frisson of excitement abetted by offstage brass and organ that fairly brought the house down.

The Brussels Philharmonic performs the final part of Connesson’s trilogy on 9 April, 2017. Further details at the Cadogan Hall website

Meanwhile further information on the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra can be found from their website

Mariinsky Orchestra with Valery Gergiev – Prokofiev Symphonies (3)

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The final instalment of Valery Gergiev’s Prokofiev symphony cycle with the Mariinsky Orchestra shed light on the composer’s late works, and was as illuminating as the previous two concerts in the series.

Late in life Prokofiev’s works took a darker turn, and while his characteristic humour is still present there are more threats in the shadows, particularly where the Symphony no.6 is concerned. This is increasingly regarded as the masterpiece of the seven, and in the right performance it carries a shattering impact.

This was the right performance emotionally, if not always in terms of ensemble. Gergiev has been unfairly criticised this week for fielding unrehearsed performances – there was absolutely no evidence to these ears in the first two concerts of that! – but in the first movement of the Sixth a few things went awry, particularly with extraneous noise from a violin and a number of flat horn solos.

The emotional content, however, was not affected, and as the symphony wore on so did the feeling of impending dread. Brief consolation was offered by the lovely, chant-like theme given to flute and oboe, but the lower end of the orchestra worked hard in punching their rhythms to the front of the performance, the sound of a machine going wrong. As the final movement started its jolly approach soon emptied, and after the brief reappearance of the consoling theme some shattering chords signalled the descent into absolute darkness. It was an incredibly powerful moment from both conductor and orchestra, and no wonder there was a pause before the applause began.

Watch a performance from 2012 of Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra in the Symphony no.6.

The Symphony no.7 has a similarly awkward ending, though here the composer is more resigned to his fate, for illness was now taking over Prokofiev’s life. The lovely unison tune that is the symphony’s calling card was beautifully sung by much of the orchestra, while the quick step theme for the last movement was impishly done, but again the sense of emptiness came through, the ticks and tocks of the final page leaving a sour taste. Prior to this the second and third movements felt like barely finished sketches, but Gergiev characterised them as he would a ballet score. It was a performance notable for its beauty – much of the ensemble problems had been restored – and also its thoughtfulness.

Watch a performance from 2012 of Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra in the Symphony no.7.

Between the two symphonies there was an extraordinary performance of the Sinfonia concertante for cello and orchestra. This marked the UK debut of the Russian cellist Alexander Ramm, and on this evidence he will be back very soon. His intonation was incredibly secure and his virtuosity almost beyond question, even in the most demanding passages where the cello sits at the very top of its register.
alexander-rammPower, pace and passion were the features of the fast music, but when this briefly relented there was a real depth of feeling to the soaring, chant-like melody of the second movement. Gergiev and the orchestra gave crisp accompaniment, but Ramm was the star for this incredibly assured and most musical performance, redolent of Steven Isserlis in his youth!

Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra have given us a Prokofiev season to relish here, reminding us of the composer’s melodic gifts, his flair when writing for orchestra and his good humour. The darker undercurrent beneath these pieces has also been fully explored, revealing Prokofiev in all his guises – occasionally rash, but often deeply profound. It has been a pleasure to be part of the experience.

Ben Hogwood

Wigmore Mondays – Doric String Quartet play Debussy and Bartók

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Doric String Quartet [Alex Redington & Jonathan Stone (violins), Hélène Clément (viola), John Myerscough (cello)]

Bartók String Quartet no.4 (1928) (26 minutes)

Debussy String Quartet in G minor (1893) (27 minutes)

Wigmore Hall, London; Monday 26 September

Listen to the BBC Radio 3 broadcast here, until 26 October

Arcana’s commentary

An intriguing clash of two of the twentieth century’s biggest composers, glimpsed at very different stages in their development. It was perhaps a surprise that the Doric Quartet chose to begin with the Bartók, with its more abrasive tones, rhythms and harmonic language, but it received an extremely fine performance here.

Bartók wrote the piece at a point where his use of ‘cyclical’ and ‘arch’ forms was prevalent in his work. The String Quartet no.4 works as an arch, its first and fifth movements big-boned compositions, while the second and fourth are flighty and elusive. The third is a typical example of the composer’s night music, supremely evocative and more than a little wary of the shadows.

If not perhaps as ‘rustic’ as some of the Hungarian quartets in performance, it was played with precision accuracy, the rhythms making themselves clear with plenty of cut and thrust. The rocking motion of the second idea in the first movement (from 3:50 on the broadcast) offered a nice contrast.

It was perhaps in the middle movements however where the Doric were strongest. The second movement, played with mutes (from 8:11) offered shadowy contours and elusive, silvery sounds – not forgetting the odd outburst – while the third, a slow movement (from 12:02), has lovely shady contours at the end (from 17:28). Best of all was the fourth movement (17:58), played pizzicato (plucked) and with some especially good snappy effects.

Bartók’s moments of simplicity were surprisingly moving, while the gritty determination on show elsewhere was very convincing – nowhere more so than the start of the last movement, a big ensemble section of terrific drive (21:08).

Debussy’s only String Quartet comes towards the start of his composing career, just as he was shaking off the overbearing influence of Wagner. It signals a conscious move towards the more ‘impressionist’ language he started using with orchestral works such as Prélude à l’apres-midi d’un faune, but remains packed with extremely catchy tunes, enjoyable humour and rich textures.

The Doric performance was a very good one but did on occasion lapse towards a bit of fussiness with tempo variations. It certainly started rather smoothly (30:31), blunting the edges of Debussy’s humour a bit, but lovingly played. The less witty approach could also be felt in the second movement (from 37:10) – which, incidentally, is receiving a lot of exposure at the moment thanks to the Apple advertisement below:

The slow movement (from 41:21) was a beauty, notable for some lovely, elegiac sounds from the viola of Hélène Clément (at 44:22) and a beautifully judged climax. The finale felt a bit episodic, and it was difficult to always hear Alex Redington’s line at the very top of the texture where I was sat at the end of the hall. That said, its exuberance (from 49:47) could hardly be faulted.

Further listening

If you like the music in this concert, Ravel’s only String Quartet is a logical piece to hear next. It bears many similarities to the Debussy but is if anything even more exquisitely formed. For something a bit fuller for strings from Bartók, the Music for strings, percussion and celesta is a terrific orchestral piece, full of atmosphere and drama – so much so that Stanley Kubrick turned to it as part of his horror film The Shining. The playlist can be found here on Spotify, together with the music from this concert:

The Oberon Symphony Orchestra play Sibelius, Liszt and the Saint-Saëns ‘Organ’ Symphony

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oberon-orchestraOberon Symphony Orchestra and Samuel Draper

Richard Whitehouse on the Oberon Symphony Orchestra‘s latest concert of Sibelius, Liszt and Saint-Saëns, given at their home of St James’s, Sussex Gardens, London on Saturday 17 September

Sibelius The Swan of Tuonela Op.22/2 (1895)

Liszt Les préludes (1854)

Sibelius Valse triste Op.44/1 (1903)

Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, ‘Organ’ (1886)

Andrew Furniss (organ), Oberon Symphony Orchestra / Samuel Draper

Tonight’s concert (the fourteenth) from the Oberon Symphony had a strong element of Liszt running through it – not least a welcome revival of the symphonic poem Les préludes which, while its historical importance is undeniable, retains only a marginal place in the repertoire.

Although it started out as the autonomous overture to settings of Joseph Autran’s Les quatre éléments (the connection with Alphonse de Lamartine’s Nouvelles méditations poétiques was made later and its reasoning remains unclear), Les préludes is essentially an abstract reflection on the passage of life from aspiration to fulfilment, and Samuel Draper rightly emphasized the cyclical evolution of its themes as these outline a viable sonata design whose introduction and coda confirm the emotional distance travelled. The secondary themes are among Liszt’s most appealing and were eloquently rendered; if the stormy central development seemed inhibited, a convincing momentum was maintained from the ethereal interlude through the reprise then on to an apotheosis whose grandeur was shorn of bombast or unnecessary grandiloquence.

These latter qualities, wholly extraneous to Liszt’s thinking, had by the mid-twentieth century reduced this piece to little more than caricature: harmlessly in the case of its soundtrack to the adventure series Flash Gordon, but offensively so when the final bars were used to announce Nazi bombing successes during the Blitz. In stressing purely musical virtues, a performance such as this can only abet the work’s and the composer’s cause; hopefully Draper will have an opportunity to include another of Liszt’ s symphonic poems in these concerts before long.

When Saint-Saëns (retrospectively) dedicated his Third Symphony to the memory of Liszt, the latter’s reputation was still intact – not least in terms of its cyclical form, making this work the harbinger of an intrinsically French take on the genre that prospered over the next century.

Draper assuredly had the measure of this stealthy evolution across two parts. After a plaintive introduction, the Allegro took time to intensify towards the climactic reprise of its first theme, but the transition to the Adagio had the right expectancy and the latter movement was almost ideal in blending seraphic poise with a lucidly unfolding variation. Andrew Furniss ensured that the organ timbre was fully integrated into that of the orchestra – the Oberon being heard at its best in a scintillating account of the scherzo; after which, the finale was taken firmly in hand so that its big tune (did those smiles among the audience betray knowledge of its use as the 1977 hit ‘If I Had Words’?) emerged unhackneyed, while the fugal and pastoral episodes were drawn into a tight-knit and cumulative progression towards the resplendent peroration.

Prefacing each of these pieces in either half was music by Sibelius. For all its popularity, The Swan of Tuonela is among its composer’s most introspective statements. Draper brought out a sustained anguish in the strings, ideally complemented by plangent cor anglais playing from Bruno Bower. If the fraught climax of Valse triste was a little diffuse, the elegiac opening and close were tellingly rendered – underlining why this miniature rapidly became a worldwide success, and thus making the composer’s signing away of its copyright the more regrettable.

The next concert by the Oberon Symphony Orchestra, with a selection of Mozart’s arias and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony (soprano Anousheh Bromfield) is on Saturday 21st January 2017

Watch the previous concert from the Oberon Symphony Orchestra, with Cosima Yu as soloist in Copland‘s Clarinet Concerto:

Further information can be found at the orchestra’s website

Mariinsky Orchestra with Valery Gergiev – Prokofiev Symphonies (2)

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Gergiev conducts Prokofiev 2 – Kristóf Baráti (violin), Mariinsky Orchestra / Valery Gergiev (above)

Cadogan Hall, London; Tuesday 27 September 2016

The second part of this week’s heavyweight Prokofiev triptych was even more rewarding than the first.

Having been blasted into limp submission by the composer’s Second and Third Symphonies – the ‘roaring twenties’ in musical form! – it was time to move into the next decade with the much more delicate Symphony no.4.

Among the seven Prokofiev symphonies this is probably the least understood, partly because it exists in two versions. The first version, heard here, was finished in 1930 and runs for 25 or so minutes. The second, revised version is a different animal altogether, with a bigger orchestra and augmented structure that make the resultant 37-minute work a heavyweight in comparison.

It was rewarding, then, to experience the delicacy and lyricism Gergiev brought to the original score. Based on themes from the ultimately unsuccessful ballet The Prodigal Son, Symphony no.4 was full of grace and shimmering textures, with particularly excellent contributions from flute, oboe and clarinet. The plot of the ballet was on occasion directly imported, so the third movement scherzo was essentially a seduction with imaginative orchestral colour, while the slow movement was both ardent and moving. The outer movements featured a more brash approach, but one that Gergiev held together well.

Watch a performance from 2012 of Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra in the Symphony no.4.

There was then a second chance to enjoy the playing of violinist Kristóf Baráti (below), who if anything outdid his first night performance. His interpretation of the Violin Concerto no.2 (1935) shone brightly, especially in the gorgeous tune of the slow movement, where a light waltz found the Mariinsky Orchestra stripped down to their bare essentials, suiting the Cadogan Hall acoustic perfectly.

The slightly drunk demeanour of the last movement was enjoyable, both violin and orchestra messing about with the rhythms to enhance the off-beat experience, while the first movement, beginning carefully on solo violin, expanded convincingly. Baráti gave us an encore of a movement from the Second solo violin sonata by Ysaÿe, but which time he had comfortably proved his stature as a very fine violinist.

Gergiev saved the best for last, a white hot performance of the Symphony no.5 (1944). On the face of it this work is an affirmative wartime symphony, but like so many pieces by Prokofiev and his contemporary and colleague Shostakovich there is a thinly veiled undercurrent of unease and turmoil. Gergiev found it immediately and pressed home the point throughout, either by making fast tempo choices for the second movement Scherzo and finale, or by deliberately leaning on some of the more painful outbursts of the slow movement.

 

Watch a performance from 2012 of Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra in the Symphony no.5.

The Mariinsky orchestra were superb, led once again by some of the most authoritative and technically proficient violinists I have ever seen. Their unity of sound took the breath away at the higher points of Prokofiev’s writing, and was complemented by outstanding contributions from clarinet, flute oboe, trumpet and even orchestral piano. Gergiev could not have overseen a better performance; that it was capped with an encore of Masks from the ballet Romeo and Juliet showed us how close Prokofiev the symphonist and stage composer stayed together throughout his musical life.

Ben Hogwood