Category Archives: In concert

BBC Proms 2023 – Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov, Les Siècles / François-Xavier Roth – Ligeti & Mozart

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Prom 47 – Isabelle Faust (violin), Alexander Melnikov (fortepiano), Les Siècles / François-Xavier Roth

Ligeti Concert Românesc (1951)
Ligeti Violin Concerto (1989-93)
Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, K488 (1786)
Mozart Symphony No. 41 in C, K551, ‘Jupiter (1788)

Royal Albert Hall, London
Sunday 20 August 2023

by Richard Whitehouse photos by Sisi Burn / BBC

A major step in the evolution of musical ‘authenticity’ or vanity project of its artistic director? Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Paris-based Les Siècles and François-Xavier Roth tonight made their third appearance at the Proms in a programme divided between Ligeti and Mozart.

Long in limbo as with most works of Ligeti’s early years, Concert Românesc now ranks as its composer’s primary crowd-pleaser – a ‘concerto for orchestra’ compact yet entertaining. Roth drew winsome charm from its initial Andantino and no mean impetus from its scherzo, before an Adagio whose dialogue of two horns (one high in the gallery) prefigures those intonational experiments three decades on. The finale did not lack verve, but anyone having heard Jonathan Nott give this piece for a Proms encore will recall just how much more scintillating it can be.

It may have had a long gestation, but Ligeti’s Violin Concerto is now established as the most recent such piece to have entered the repertoire. Technically assured but never merely showy, Isabelle Faust is a fine exponent, and it was not her fault if a lengthy platform reset made for a restive audience response in the teasingly understated Praeludium or plangent fervency of Aria, Hoquetus, Chorale which is one of the composer’s most potent inspirations. Diversely yet modestly scored, this work needs to be projected for its emotional impact to be felt and a certain bemusement met its coruscating Intermezzo and anguished Passacaglia, but not its engaging Appassionato in which Faust’s methodical cadenza fitted seamlessly into context. As, also, did the sparse Andante of Erwin Schulhoff’s Solo Violin Sonata given as an encore.

There was a similar sense of ends not always equating with means in Mozart’s Twenty-Third Piano Concerto after the interval. Playing a (Graf?) fortepiano from deep within the orchestra, Alexander Melnikov summoned playing of admirable dynamic subtlety and emotional poise – notably an Adagio whose bittersweet fatalism was consummately rendered. Just how much detail and articulation could be heard in the farther reaches of this acoustic was uncertain, but the rapport between soloist and orchestra in a sparkling final Allegro could hardly be gainsaid.

Playing to period-pitch in the second half (just occasionally offset by vagaries of intonation), Les Siècles came into its collective own with an engrossing account of Mozart’s Forty-First Symphony, its Jupiterian connotations evident from the outset of an opening Allegro whose distinction between (relative) dynamism and stasis was thrown into relief with Roth’s use of pause for expressive punctuation. Best here were an Andante whose muted while often dense textures were precisely articulated, then a Menuetto whose sweeping gait found contrast in a quizzical trio whose closing phrase was pointedly curtailed. Not that Roth had other than the measure of the finale, fully integrating its thematic unity into a powerfully controlled overall structure, but its underlying progress felt just a shade dogged in the light of what preceded it. That said, there was no lack of impetus when, after the longest of those pauses, Roth led his forces through the magisterial coda; duly setting the seal on a programme that played to this orchestra’s strengths if not always having been designed with the Royal Albert Hall in mind.

For more on the 2023 BBC Proms, visit the festival’s website at the BBC. Meanwhile click on the names for more information on artists Les Siècles, conductor François-Xavier Roth, violinist Isabelle Faust and pianist Alexander Melnikov. You can discover more about Ligeti at this dedicated website

BBC Proms 2023 – Soloists, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra / Ryan Wigglesworth – György Kurtág’s ‘Endgame’

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Prom 43

Endgame (2011-18) [UK Premiere]

Scenes and monologues; opera in one act by György Kurtág; Libretto by the composer after Samuel Beckett’s Fin de partie

Semi-staged performance; sung in French with English surtitles

Hamm – Fred Olsen (bass), Clov – Morgan Moody (bass-baritone), Nell – Hilary Summers (contralto), Nagg – Leonardo Cortellazzi (tenor), Victoria Newlyn (stage director)

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra / Ryan Wigglesworth

Royal Albert Hall, London

Thursday 17th August 2023

Royal Albert Hall, London
Friday 11 August 2023

by Richard Whitehouse photos by Sisi Burn / BBC

It may have had to wait three years since being postponed from the 2020 season, but tonight’s Prom brought a first hearing in this country for György Kurtág’s opera Endgame after Samuel Beckett and a performance such as, in the event, delivered at least as much as it had promised.

Although seeing Fin de partie on his first visit to Paris in 1957, it took several decades before Kurtág felt able to tackle a full-length opera and only in 2010 was a formal commission made by La Scala – presaging seven years of sustained (and evidently torturous) activity prior to its Milan premiere in November 2018. The subtitle is ‘Scenes and monologues; opera in one act’ and, having set 60% of the original French text, Kurtág still intends to add further scenes but, now in his 98th year, it would not be surprising were this opera to remain in its present form.

Unfolding continuously (and with no interval) across almost two hours, Endgame consists of 14 scenes which hone Beckett’s already sparse drama down to an unremitting focus on its four characters in their undoubted hopelessness and seeming helplessness. Vocally the predominant idiom is a speech-inflected arioso conveying its text with acute clarity against the backdrop of an orchestra which, despite – perhaps because of – its size and diversity, is almost always used sparingly. Stylistically the music invokes those traits familiar from its composer’s work across six decades which are not diluted as rendered in new and unlikely contexts; one notable aspect is the oblique while always audible allusion to those earlier composers who have accompanied Kurtág over his life’s work, and that here emerge as ‘figures’ all but tangible in their presence.

Utilizing three of the four singers from the Milan production, the cast could hardly have been stronger in commitment or insight. His being even more the defining role than with Beckett’s play, Frode Olsen here conveyed the predicament of Hamm with an authority the greater for its restrained vulnerability. He was abetted in this by Morgan Moody, whose Clov was poised between servant and protégé for a portrayal always empathetic however great its exasperation. Leonardo Cortellazzi summoned deftly whimsical humour as Nagg, reconciled to his dustbin-clad fate in contrast to the bittersweet recollections of Nell as taken by Hilary Summers – her eloquence extended by a later Beckett poem in a touching prologue. Victoria Newlyn brought the stark stasis of the drama and expanse of the Albert Hall’s acoustic into persuasive accord.

A versatile and perceptive conductor (and no mean opera composer, witness his ENO drama The Winter’s Tale six years previously), Ryan Wigglesworth duly had the measure of Kurtág’s elusive if inimitable idiom and drew a fastidious response from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; its playing as attentive to the score’s many subtleties as to its emotional highpoints – not least the closing bars, whose wrenching dissonance speaks of catharsis at least as much as of tragedy. The composer will hopefully have had an opportunity to hear this performance.

One looks forward to an eventual staging of this opera in the UK (following those subsequent productions in Amsterdam and Paris). Whatever else, Endgame is the summative work which Kurtág had to write and as confirmed tonight, the effort in its realization has not been in vain.

For more on the 2023 BBC Proms, visit the festival’s website at the BBC. Meanwhile click on the names for resources relating to György Kurtág and Samuel Beckett – and on the artist names Ryan Wigglesworth, Frode Olsen, Morgan Moody, Hilary Summers, Leonardo Cortellazzi, Victoria Newlyn and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

BBC Proms 2023 – Soloists, London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra / Gardner – Ligeti & Richard Strauss

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Prom 36 – Jennifer France (soprano), Clare Presland (mezzo-soprano), Edvard Grieg Kor, London Philharmonic Choir, Royal Northern College of Music Chamber Choir, London Philharmonic Orchestra / Edward Gardner

Ligeti Requiem (1963-5); Lux aeterna (1966)
Richard Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra Op.30 (1896)

Royal Albert Hall, London
Friday 11 August 2023

by Richard Whitehouse photos by Mark Allan / BBC

There did not seem any more concrete reason to build a Prom around the music from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey other than this being the 55th anniversary of its release, but it at least offered an opportunity to revive one of the last century’s defining choral works.

Much has been made of a then avant-garde composer writing a piece based on a seminal text from the Christian liturgy, but centenary composer György Ligeti’s Requiem is anything but beholden to tradition. Focussing on what would normally constitute the first half of the Requiem Mass itself skews the textual imagery away from any hope of attaining ‘eternal rest’ – the four movements duly proceeding from a sombre Introitus in which the music’s conceptual vastness along with its expressive extremes are laid bare. The Kyrie is the most (in)famous part – emerging in two successive and cumulative waves of micropolyphony both overwhelming and disorientating, not least when rendered with the poise and precision that the combined choirs summoned in the Albert Hall’s expanse. Inevitably, the terror of the infinite gives way to that of the absurd.

Hence the Dies irae sequence, designated On the Day of Judgement and a veritable tour de force of choral outbursts with vocal interjections; Clare Presland’s ominous intoning tellingly offset by Jennifer France’s stentorian pronouncements, with the wind and brass of the London Philharmonic Orchestra visceral in their contribution under the attentive guidance of Edward Gardner. Neither did the Lacrimosa lack gravitas, the soloists musing eloquently if wearily against a stark instrumental backdrop whose essential emptiness carries through to the close.

While not intended as a continuation of the larger work, Lux aeterna still makes for a viable resolution in its undulating yet never static textures such as conjure the presence of ‘eternal light’ without any concomitant spiritual aspect. Set high-up in the gallery, to the right of the platform, the Edvard Grieg Kor evinced a faultless intonation along with a tangible sense of the music’s timelessness – though this piece would maybe have been better placed after the Ligeti instead of before the Strauss, not least as there was no segue between the latter works.

Also sprach Zarathustra was, of course, elevated to a new level of public recognition after its Introduction had been utilized as fanfare in Kubrick’s film, and a less than thrilling rendition here at least ensured this Sunrise could not pre-empt the remainder in Strauss’s free-ranging overview of Friedrich Nietzsche’s influential tract. On fine form overall, the various sections of the LPO relished their passages in the spotlight, reminding one that this piece is as much a ‘concerto for orchestra’ before its own time as the musical embodiment of human aspiration. Pieter Schoemann audibly enjoyed setting The Dance Song in motion and while others have made its climax more intoxicating, Gardner brought a rapt serenity to the Night Wanderer’s Song such as made the tonal equivocation of those final bars the more acute and intriguing.

Numerous recent Proms have followed the second-half work with an ‘official’ encore and, while this practice is not always justified, the inclusion tonight of a certain waltz by another Strauss would have extended the 2001 concept still further and effected a more definite close.

For more on the 2023 BBC Proms, visit the festival’s website at the BBC. Meanwhile click on the names for more information on artists Jennifer France, Clare Presland, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Ed Gardner. For more on Ligeti, head to this dedicated website

BBC Proms 2023 – Leila Josefowicz, BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo – Berg & Mahler

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Prom 35 – Leila Josefowicz (violin), BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo

Berg Violin Concerto (1935)
Mahler Symphony no.7 (1904-5)

Royal Albert Hall, London
Thursday 10 August 2023

by Richard Whitehouse photos by Chris Christodoulou / BBC

The late indisposition of Sir Andrew Davis saw Sakari Oramo at the helm for this programme of Berg and Mahler, an effective coupling even allowing for the replacement of the latter’s Tenth Symphony with his Seventh. Hopefully it will be ‘third time lucky’ for Davis and Mahler 10.

It might have received almost 20 hearings at these concerts, but Berg’s Violin Concerto is not easy to bring off in so resonant an acoustic as the Albert Hall’s. As elegantly as she delineated the initial Andante’s arch-like trajectory, Leila Josefowicz did struggle to make herself heard against a restrained though dense orchestral backdrop. Balance righted itself with the ensuing Allegretto – the soloist’s ingratiating response ideal for its alluring, even coy expression with a bittersweet folksong inflections then its ominous foreshadowing of the work’s second part.

It was in that latter half’s Allegro the performance really took flight, Josefowicz as attuned to its fractious opening pages as to the plangent searching of its cadenza-like central span. Both the seismic start of the movement’s culmination and its convulsive wind-down were assuredly handled – the emergence of Bach’s Es ist genug chorale setting the course for a final Adagio where pensive inwardness and heartfelt supplication were palpably conveyed through to the fervent climax, then a close bringing matters full circle with its mood of beatific resignation.

Unheard at the Proms until 1969, Mahler’s Seventh was also the last of his symphonies to win wider acceptance and is still a tough challenge to make cohere. Oramo (above) had its measure though not consistently in an opening movement, the effortfulness of whose introduction pervades its main Allegro yet without impeding its onward and increasingly cumulative course. For all the wonderment of its central interlude then emotional heft of the lead-in to the reprise, there was yet a sense of this music being coerced into shape rather than unfolding with due inevitability. Not so the ‘First Night Music’, its intertwining of the speculative and crepuscular rendered to bewitching effect – Oramo balancing those intricate yet translucent textures with a sure sense of where this movement was headed, namely a resolution not so much tentative as intangible.

Equally elusive, the central Scherzo can seem an exercise in flitting gestures as fail to add up to anything more substantial but here exuded darkly ironic humour as it wended its unsettling way. The ‘shadowy’ duly found its ideal complement in the ‘amorous’ manner of the ‘Second Night Music’ – its underlying affability all too easy to make bland or faceless, yet which here unfolded with a precise feel for its function within Mahler’s teasingly oblique formal scheme. As was almost equally true of the Rondo-Finale – its ordinario marking easy to misinterpret, but in which Oramo’s sure and steadfast if never turgid course made the most of its engaging progress. Hardly alone in not quite making the reappearance of first-movement material feel other than contrived, he nevertheless headed through those final pages with irresistible verve.

This performance would not have been as successful overall without its sterling contribution by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, both in soloistic passages or those tuttis as give the outer movements their impact. Ten years on, the rapport between orchestra and conductor remains undimmed.

For more on the 2023 BBC Proms, visit the festival’s website at the BBC. Meanwhile click on the names for more information on artists Leila Josefowicz, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their chief conductor Sakari Oramo

BBC Proms 2023 – Dame Sarah Connolly, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra / John Storgårds – Weber, Pejačević, Alma Mahler-Werfel & Rachmaninoff

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Prom 33 – Dame Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano), BBC Philharmonic Orchestra / John Storgårds

Weber Oberon – Overture (1825-6)
Pejačević Zwei Schmetterlingslieder Op.52 (1920); Verwandlung Op.37b (1915); Liebeslied Op.39 (1915). [Proms premieres]
Mahler-Werfel orch. Colin & David Matthews Die stille Stadt (pub. 1915); Licht in der Nacht (pub. 1915); Bei dir ist es traut (pub. 1910)
Rachmaninoff Symphony no.1 in D minor Op.13 (1895)

Royal Albert Hall, London
Wednesday 9 August 2023

by Richard Whitehouse photos by Chris Christodoulou / BBC

This evening’s Prom brought a welcome appearance by the BBC Philharmonic with its chief conductor John Storgårds, in what was a typically enterprising programme that continued this season’s emphasis on the music of Dora Pejačević in the centenary (last March) of her death.

Among Pejačević’s sizable output of songs are four with orchestra, making a viable sequence in its own right. Dame Sarah Connolly (above) brought out the searching whimsicality from Karl Henckell’s Butterfly Songs, whether the fanciful imaginings of ‘Golden stars, little bluebells’ or the more concrete thoughts of ‘Flutter, o butterfly’ with delicate contributions by flute and glockenspiel. The setting of Kael Kraus’s Transformation taps deeper emotion, not least with those ecstatic violin solos between stanzas (eloquently rendered by Yuri Torchinsky), whereas that of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Love Song is notable less for the gently undulating phrases of its vocal writing than for the soaring ecstasy of its central interlude which only double one’s regret that neither composer nor poet lived long enough to collaborate on an opera project as had been mooted.

Making up this sequence were three songs by Alma Mahler-Werfel, taken from sets published in 1910 and 1915. Neither those contrived sentiments of Richard Dehemel’s The Silent Town or self-conscious emoting of Otto Julius Birbaum’s Light in the Night summons an especially personal response; only the winsome poise of Rilke’s I feel warm and close with you implies any individuality. The orchestrations by Colin and David Matthews are sensitive and apposite, but the latter might reasonably have expected more from the Proms in his 80th birthday-year.

Opening this concert was a beautifully judged reading of the overture to Weber’s final opera Oberon – less often heard now that overtures are no longer the automatic curtain-raisers they once were but which, in its deft interplay of evocative and energetic, still casts a potent spell.

By contrast, Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony has come much more into its own now that the composer’s orchestral output has moved to the centre of the repertoire. Unheard for 48 years after its disastrous premiere in 1897, it remains a testament to the young composer’s ambition – not least in an opening Allegro whose implacable ‘motto’ sets the course for this movement overall. Storgårds had its measure, not least in the mounting fervency of its development, then delivered a probing account of a scherzo the more ingenious for its pervasive understatement.

Although it will never supplant that of its successor in audience affection, the slow movement is a minor miracle of thematic subtlety and emotional restraint as came through via felicitous playing by the BBC Philharmonic woodwind. Launching the finale in suitably visceral fashion, Storgårds (rightly) made the most of its contrasts between the celebratory and the speculative – any remaining ambivalence not so much resolved as forced into submission through a coda which renders the fatalism of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique from a distinctly personal vantage.

So, an unlikely programme which worked well as a concert – the more so given it proceeded without an interval. Those in the audience surreptitiously eating or drinking between pieces might have preferred otherwise, but for both music and performances it was nothing but gain.

For more on the 2023 BBC Proms, visit the festival’s website at the BBC. Meanwhile click on the names for more information on artists Dame Sarah Connolly, John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra – and for information on the composers Dora Pejačević and Alma Mahler-Werfel