With the arrival of July 1st, here are two very different musical responses to the month. The first is an extract from Tchaikovsky’s popular cycle for piano, The Seasons – designating July to be The Song of the Reaper:
Then, with the weather here in the UK having been a little downcast this morning, a very different response from Bomb The Bass. Winter In July is a wonderfully moody song, with vocals from Loretta Haywood. It could only be from the early 1990s!
Eugene Tzikindelean, Kirsty Lovie (violins), Adam Römer, aDavid BaMaung (violas), Eduardo Vassallo, aArthur Boutillier (cellos)
Gardner True Self (2023) [CBSO Centenary Commission: World Premiere]
Tchaikovsky String Sextet in D minor, Op. 70, ‘Souvenir de Florence’ (1890)a
CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Thursday 8 June 2023 (2pm)
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
This last of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Centre Stage programmes for this season brought together the most heard work for the relatively limited medium of string sextet with a Centenary Commission for string quartet by a composer born and based in Birmingham.
Best known for her diverse arrangements of African-American classics taking in Odetta and Alicia Keys, Bobbie-Jane Gardner has also written extensively for classical ensembles; most recently Up on the Toes (the slippery stair dance) for brass quintet (recorded by Onyx Brass), and now True Self. Taking its cue from the Buddhist virtue of absolute happiness, this latter unfolds along an ‘innocence to experience’ trajectory prior to a new awakening – the whole piece founded on a motif whose ‘childlike’ innocence is pervaded by its own vulnerability.
Harmonically subtle and rhythmically agile, True Self received what sounded a committed reading from the CBSO players – notably in the opening section when the music stirs gently but insistently into life, and towards the close when it touches on a resolution not so much tentative as anticipatory. Maybe these nine minutes could yet prove the first stage of a large-scale work or series of pieces? At any rate, it left a thoughtful and affecting impression, and will hopefully be taken up by other quartets seeking a worthwhile addition to the repertoire.
Souvenir de Florence has never been out of its respective repertoire, and this performance gave it its due – not least an impetuous opening Allegro as made the most of Tchaikovsky’s frequently dense part-writing, with a thrillingly climactic lead-back to the reprise, followed by an Adagio whose emotional build-ups were never indulged or overbearing. Even so, the speculative central interlude (with its edgy sul ponticello exchanges) might have benefitted from a touch more ambivalence to set the expansive sections either side into greater relief.
There was no doubting the trenchancy of the Allegretto, outwardly an intermezzo but with a scherzo-like capriciousness across its trio, while the unabashed rhetoric of the final Allegro was finely controlled as this movement reached a close of suitably breathless exhilaration.
You can read all about the 2023/24 season for Centre Stage at the CBSO website. Click on the composer name for more information on Bobbie-Jane Gardner, or visit her Soundcloud page
Tier3 Trio [Daniel Grimwood (piano), Joseph Wolfe (violin), Jonathan Ayling (cello)]
Tchaikovsky Piano Trio in A minor Op.50 (1881-2)
St Giles’ Cripplegate, London
Friday 9 June 2023
Reviewed by Ben Hogwood
Summer Music in City Churches is a week-long festival in London’s Square Mile, bringing a wide range of classical music to the capital’s audiences in a format that brings fond reminiscences of the much-missed City of London Festival.
For their fifth year, the City Churches concerts run under the theme Legends & Heroes, inspiring creative programmes from solo piano (Mark Bebbington’s Liszt-themed hour) through to a centenary performance of Walton’s Façade and a welcome pairing of Haydn’s Nelson Mass and Bliss’s Pastoral: Lie Strewn The White Flocks, closing the festival on Thursday 15 June.
St Giles’ Cripplegate played host to the Goliath of piano trios, the Tier3 Trio bringing us Tchaikovsky’s sole but very substantial essay in the genre. The composer had tried his hand at the format within the confines of his Piano Concerto no.2, writing the slow movement almost exclusively for violin, cello and piano. Here, he seems to go the other way, writing music for trio that sounds orchestral both in concept and sound. The piece is a sizeable memorial, the subtitle ‘À la mémoire d’un grand artiste’ a recognition of Tchaikovsky’s great friend and mentor, pianist Nikolay Rubinstein.
The challenge facing Tier3 – named after the pandemic conditions in which they were formed – was to get their sound to fill the roomy acoustic of St Giles without it losing detail, and this they commendably achieved. The balance between the instruments was ideal, thanks to Daniel Grimwood’s sensitive and clear phrasing at the keyboard, as well as careful attention to dynamic detail from violinist Joseph Wolfe and cellist Jonathan Ayling.
This is such a passionate piece that it would be easy to peak too soon, but this interpretation was borne of experience and a clear love for Tchaikovsky’s music. The sizeable first movement, clocking in at over 20 minutes, was ideally paced and compelling throughout. A sense of sorrow pervaded the soulful opening, with a profound solo from Ayling, but gradually chinks of light began to show, especially in Grimwood’s heroic second theme, block chords pealing like bells.
Despite its orchestral outbursts the trio does contain music of great tenderness, and these were found in sweetly toned violin and doleful cello, set against arpeggiated chords from Grimwood’s piano – a telling episode before the return of the main theme, radiating great sorrow.
The second and third movements effectively merge into a huge finale, Tchaikovsky presenting a Theme with 11 variations and a vast coda of boundless invention and variety. Here they kept the audience on the edge of their seats.
Early on there was brilliant virtuosity from Grimwood, the tumbling variations of the third variation giving it a balletic quality. These led into a passionate cello solo from Ayling, immediately contrasted by celesta-like sonorities from the upper range of the piano. An appropriately heroic seventh variation led to a fugue of impressive clarity and dexterity, before the figurations of the ninth variation unexpectedly conjured the vision of flowers falling onto a coffin.
A quirky tenth variation and relatively serene counterpart led us to the coda, an emphatic and exuberant theme surging forward. Here the players were at the limit but rose to the occasion magnificently, emotions close to the surface, before the final twist when the music returned to the minor key. Here there were parallels to the funeral march from Chopin’s Piano Sonata no.2 before the music gradually and respectfully subsided to silence.
This was an extremely fine performance of a piece whose impact remains considerable, an outpouring keenly conveyed to the St. Giles’ audience by players relishing the experience. As an encore Tier3 made a most imaginative and suitable choice, giving us a the fourth of Widor’s short Pieces en Trio. Titled Sérénade, it was a charming complement to the sunshine outside.
You can read more about Summer Music In City Churches at the festival website – and click on the artist name to read more about Tier3 Trio.
Alexandre Kantorow (piano), CBSO Youth Chorus, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada
Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto no.2 in G major Op. 44 (1879-80)
Holst The Planets Op. 32 (1914-17)
Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 2 February 2023
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
He may not take up his role as Chief Conductor for a couple of months, but Kazuki Yamada already has acute rapport with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, as was evident tonight in this unlikely though effective coupling of major works by Tchaikovsky and Holst.
While it has never aspired to the popularity of its predecessor, Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto lacks none of the melodic appeal or emotional heft synonymous with this composer. Growing conviction that piano and orchestra were best heard separately rather than together can give the first movement a rather stop-start trajectory, but with Alexandre Kantorow (below) alive to its bravura and poetic facets there was never a sense of disjointedness in a first movement – emphasis on whose ‘brillante’ and ‘vivace’ markings avoided any risk of portentousness.
Although those aspects of the edition by Alexander Ziloti that simplify the solo writing have now been consigned to history, truncation of the Andante into an intermezzo akin to that of the First Concerto remains common. To do so, however, misses out on the expansiveness of this movement – notably its eventful trialogue between piano, violin and cello as dominates the latter stages, and which here saw a sustained interaction between Kantorow and the CBSO section leaders (Eugene Tzikindelean and an as yet unidentified cellist. Yamada directed with an unobtrusive rightness, then gave the soloist his head in a finale that makes up for its relative brevity with scintillating wit and agility – not least in the coda when, having resisted any temptation for a grand apotheosis, Tchaikovsky allows soloist and orchestra an effervescent race to the close.
Tchaikovsky was never an influence on Holst, and the conventional scoring of the former’s piece is worlds away from that of The Planets with its extended range of ingenious timbres and textures. Finding the right martial pulse at the outset of Mars, Yamada built this first piece to a pulverizing climax – after which, the enfolding raptness of Venus was the more tangible in its serenity and poise. The deftness and insouciance of Mercury was no less to the fore, and the only reservations came in a Jupiter whose bracing outer sections verged on the dogged; with a central section whose indelible melody took on a ceremonial turgidity which has nothing to do with this music as Holst conceived it. Happily, the remaining three pieces, which all too often seem anticlimactic, emerged as highlights of this performance.
Undeniably the emotional focal-point, Saturn unfolded from initial remoteness to a climax whose sense of crisis was palpably evident, before withdrawing into a radiant evanescence. Contrast with the sardonic humour of Uranus was pronounced – Yamada making the most of its flights of fancy, then lurchingly triumphant parade, before the heart-stopping dissolve near its close. Neptune capped proceedings superbly – its strangeness and insubstantiality allied to searching introspection which afforded cohesion to this venture into the unknown.
Placed high to the left of the auditorium, the CBSO Youth Chorus added its ethereal tones. The final fadeout began almost too remotely to be sustained yet, as this repeating vocalise moved beyond earshot, there was no doubt as to the totality of what had been experienced.
You can read all about the 2022/23 season and book tickets at the CBSO website. Click on the artist names for more on Kazuki Yamada and Alexandre Kantorow – and for more on Gustav Holst, head to The Holst Society
by Ben Hogwood
With the weather taking a sharp turn for the colder in the UK today, thoughts turn to wintry music. An underrated gem in this area is the first symphony of Tchaikovsky, which the composer subtitled Winter Daydreams.
This is a tuneful and highly appealing work from 1866, showing the influence of Mendelssohn but also revealing Tchaikovsky’s own individual grasp of symphonic form, and his aptitude for writing programme music.
The full subtitle of the first movement is Dreams of a Winter Journey, while the second movement, Land of Desolation, Land of Mists, is the emotional heart of the symphony with a yearning slow theme. The cool, slight melancholy of the untitled third movement Scherzo is swept away by a jubilant Finale, bringing Tchaikovsky’s first symphonic structure to a satisfying end.
There was much more to come, of course! You can enjoy the symphony in a performance from the Berlin Philharmoniker and Herbert von Karajan below:
Arcana.fm 