Herbert Blomstedt on magnificent form as he nears 90, plus all of May 2017's best classical concerts
We review the best classical concerts of the month
Richard Goode, Bath Festival ★★★★☆
The American pianist Richard Goode has long been one of the most dependable of performers, guaranteed to bring fresh insights to his Beethoven in particular. That speciality rounded off his sold-out recital at Bath’s Assembly Rooms, which proved to be a highlight in the city’s newly configured multi-arts festival.
He opened with Bach’s Partita in E minor, BWV830. Framed by two big contrapuntal movements, it is the most challenging of all Bach’s keyboard suites, yet Goode seemed positively relaxed as he revelled in the dynamic shadings he drew from the piano. This was (in the best sense) old-school Bach, with plenty of pedal, and it gave the introductory Toccata improvisatory spirit. That carried over into the remaining six movements, not least in the fluid melody of the Corrente, where even in the fastest passages Goode seemed to be caressing the keyboard lightly. But he ensured that the Sarabande was the gravitational centre of the work.
His group of Chopin pieces functioned almost like a suite of dances, too, though the introduction was in a non-dance form: the late Nocturne in B major, Op. 62 No. 1. Goode is not one for over-dreamy Chopin and his forward pulse was welcome, especially since he had the light-worn virtuosity required for the reprise of the main theme, ornamented entirely in trills. If his three slightly scrambled Mazurkas wouldn’t win prizes for their Polishness, he made up for this with a magnificent account of the Polonaise-Fantaisie, where he held all the impulses of this masterpiece in balance: in a performance that mixed delicacy with fiery heroism, the Polonaise rhythms were very present.
It was a masterstroke after this piece in hybrid form to switch back to Beethoven: his Sonata in A, Op. 101, is a great experiment with form, and Goode captured its questing spirit. He brought crisp attack to the scherzo and romped through the fugal finale with musical imagination. Similar qualities came out in his performance of Beethoven’s Op. 110, the central panel of his final triptych of sonatas. It also ends fugally, and it brought a recital that had begun with Bach full circle
Curtis Symphony Orchestra/Vänskä, Cadogan Hall ★★★
The London stop of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra's European tour ought to have been a celebration of emerging musical talent, and in some ways it was. Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music is one of the world's leading musical conservatories, and it was good that London - well, at least Cadogan Hall's small audience — was able to welcome these students. But the evening also reflected badly on the music industry: if nothing else, one hopes it will have served an educational purpose.
Lesson number one will have been about the exigencies of touring and dealing with promoters. Halfway through a trip that takes it to several splendid European venues, the orchestra ended up in the pokey Cadogan Hall playing Strauss's massive Ein Heldenleben. Quite apart from the perennial issue of why London's main concert halls remain unavailable to visiting ensembles, including many great orchestras, the question needs to be asked again why promoters of such tours encourage programmes unsuited to such claustrophobic acoustics.
Perhaps the conductor Osmo Vänskä had little option other than to drive the players hard, but this was a roof-raising account of Strauss's most self-indulgent tone poem. The exuberance of the opening registered well, and certainly the work was a good showcase for an orchestra of young virtuosi — the sweet-toned, quicksilver violin solos from the leader, Maria Ioudenitch, were a highlight. As budding soloists all, they may not have blended ideally, but high spirits (exemplified in the encore of Bernstein's Candide overture) saved the evening.
It had got off to a curious start: where Vänskä had propelled the Strauss along brazenly, he dragged out an un-nuanced introduction to Brahms's Piano Concerto No1 in D minor. Maybe he was trying to accommodate the soloist, Peter Serkin, who clearly has his own way of playing the piece and is not one for Brahmsian warmth. The middle movement almost ground the halt as Serkin's etiolated tinklings made the case for Brahms the modernist. Although Serkin supplied vigorous attack in places, it was all the little choppy and meandering.
Again, this was hardly the right piece for Cadogan Hall, nor perhaps for Serkin to return with to London so soon after his Brahms Second Piano Concerto at last year's Proms. A Curtis alumnus (class of 1964), Serkin has impeccable credentials and a distinguished name, but, since Curtis is in the business of training new talent, it would have been nice to hear some. JA
The Curtis Symphony Orchestra's European tour continues until June 2. Details: curtis.edu/europe
Philharmonia/Blomstedt, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★★
It seems to be veterans’ week on London’s orchestral podiums. While Bernard Haitink is busy with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia is working with the even more senior Herbert Blomstedt. To judge by his sprightly presence at the Festival Hall, the Swedish-American maestro – who turns 90 in July – shows no sign of slowing down, which is just as well: few conductors half his age would bring such freshness and energy to a programme of Beethoven and Brahms, or be willing to immediately take it on a mini-tour to Bath and Canterbury.
Brahms’s Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor formed the first half of the concert, in which Blomstedt was joined by the soloist Martin Helmchen. In terms of structural command, both were in agreement about how to shape this titanic work. Blomstedt led the way in the long orchestral introduction, drawing fine-grained playing from the Philharmonia and finding both the striving tension and consoling warmth of the music.
Helmchen’s entry immediately showed that he had both grace and power, quintessential parts of any Brahms pianist’s armoury, which when combined with such instinctive balance release that natural but sometimes elusive Brahmsian weightiness. The first movement also saw Helmchen switching easily from stormy double octaves to darting lightness. Together, conductor and pianist found the chorale-like spirituality of the slow movement (with its pre-echoes of Wagner’s Parsifal). They stuck strongly to the barnstorming trajectory of the finale while allowing room for its excursions into pastoral lyricism, something not always explored.
If that reflected the wisdom of old age, Blomstedt also brought his long experience to bear on Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Though the work belongs (along with the Third and Fifth) to the heroic strain in Beethoven, Blomstedt made us hear traces of the “Pastoral” (the Sixth) as well. Conducting without a baton, he sculpted the phrases with his hands before seeming to release them into the air, but never lost the necessary tight rhythmic control. After all, this is a symphony without a real slow movement, and music which Wagner famously called “the apotheosis of the dance”.
Not given to hanging around much between movements, Blomstedt drove a blazing yet never inflexible performance. His sense of fun visibly increased as the whooping horns (who had a good evening overall) signalled the climax of the finale. Showing a level of delight rare among conductors, this veteran is a shining example to jaded musicians (and critics) everywhere.
This programme is repeated in Bath (May 26) and Canterbury (May 28), and is also available via the BBC iPlayer. Details: philharmonia.co.uk
LSO/Haitink, Barbican ★★★★★
Bernard Haitink’s remarkable Indian summer shows no sign of waning. In the first of three concerts he is conducting with the London Symphony Orchestra between now and next week, the 88-year-old Dutch maestro made no concessions to age, apart from sitting briefly between the massive movements of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. And however valedictory the tone of this masterpiece – a work that aroused all Mahler’s own superstitions – this was not an old-man’s performance but rather an interpretation of long-accumulated wisdom. In fact, it was a concert embracing all ages, and dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Manchester attack: in the words of Gareth Davies, the LSO’s principal flautist and chairman, “Where words fail, music speaks”.
But as part of what might be called Mahler’s trilogy of farewell, the Ninth unquestionably exudes visionary power and represents the composer at his most modern. Haitink caught its inexorability right from the start, coming closer than many to that spirit the work’s first conductor, Bruno Walter, evoked in its historic first recording made in Vienna during the fateful late Thiries. Here, as there, a rawness in the playing spoke not of unpolished musicianship but perhaps of ragged emotion.
The halting rhythms that Leonard Bernstein ascribed to the faltering pulse of Mahler’s own irregular heart registered here before Haitink steadied them into a funeral march-like tread. But Haitink also showed himself alert to Mahler’s highly original sonorities: this was the composer who really elevated the harp above decorative duties to make it toll like a muted bell.
After playing that had sometimes sounded deliberately hazy, the second movement brought things into vivid focus. Even though he was revisiting his beloved Landlër, this is not simply a case of Mahler exploring the same dance forms yet again, and Haitink ensured that these folk dances sounded anything but genial. He drew heavy-footed, galumphing accents from the orchestra. Even more bitingly, the orchestra found the defiant tone of the third movement, which lived up to its Burleske subtitle.
Real warmth arrived only in the finale, an Adagio full of spiritual feeling. The chorale-like opening of this movement brought forth the most well-upholstered string sound of the evening, but Haitink also ensured that the players captured the music’s other-worldly transcendence. A searing performance, albeit one achieved with economy of gesture, this showed again how Haitink is one of the last patricians of the podium. JA
Haitink conducts the LSO on May 28 and June 1. Details: lso.co.uk
Budapest Festival Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, ★★★★☆
Under its founder conductor Ivan Fischer, the Budapest Festival Orchestra played a programme of music that stands at the core of its mission – Bartók’s Hungarian Peasant Songs and his one-act opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. It may have been embarrassing – and depressing – to find so many empty seats for a rare visit by an ensemble regularly ranked as one of the world’s greatest, but it was also heartening that what we heard was greeted with such enthusiasm and attention.
The format was not altogether conventional. Fischer began the evening by delivering some gentle introductory remarks explaining Bartók’s field researches in folk music, illustrated with three of the grainy yet amazingly vivid recordings that formed the basis for the orchestral suite of Peasant Songs.
We were also treated to a live performance of some of these songs by the doyenne of Hungarian traditional music, Márta Sebetsyén, accompanied by an ebullient string trio drawn from the orchestra. Sebestyén’s voice is dark, nasal and hardly sweetly pretty, but the unaffected simplicity of her style in these jaunty modal numbers proved irresistibly charming. I only wish that either Fischer or the programme or surtitles had given us some idea of what the songs were about.
Although the performance of the orchestral suite showed off the astonishing richness and vibrancy of the Budapesters’ strings, it was only in the more challenging Duke Bluebeard’s Castle that one began to appreciate the full genius of the ensemble – the palette of the wind section is rich in astonishingly pungent colours, and I’ve seldom heard such majestic brass as that which hailed the opening of Bluebeard’s fifth door. No London-based orchestra can match the intensity of this playing.
Fischer himself spoke the opera’s eerie prologue, and went on to conduct a reading of slow-burn Hitchockian tension that didn’t miss a trick. What sensuous beauty he finds in this bleak parable of human relationships, from the scritchy-scratchy pianissimo in the cellos and basses as the couple enter the castle to the final ghostly and ghastly procession as Judit takes her place among Bluebeard’s victims.
A magnificent young bass Krisztian Cser sang Bluebeard with chillingly implacable authority, but I was disappointed in the veteran Ildikó Komlosi, whose mezzo-soprano is now too worn and occasionally tremulous to convey Judit’s eager naivete and misplaced ardour. The programme informs us that she’s sung this role over 150 times; perhaps she should drop it now. RC
No further performances
Monteverdi Vespers, Saint John's Smith Square ★★★★★
All the stars were in alignment at Saint John’s Smith Square last weekend. It was the opening weekend of the current London Festival of Baroque Music, the last in the splendid ten-year reign of artistic director Lindsay Kemp. It was also 450 years to the day since the birth of Claudio Monteverdi, the great radical who pulled music out of the calm of the Renaissance into the turbulence of Baroque passion and sensuality. Plus, two terrific ensembles, the Belgian choir Vox Luminis and the Freiburg Baroque Consort had been brought together to perform the Vespers, Monteverdi’s greatest religious work.
The Vespers were essentially Monteverdi’s calling card for a top job, and it is lavish and endlessly inventive in a way that beggars belief. By the end, it seemed that every possible combination of voices and violins and creamy-toned wooden trumpets and lutes had been tried out. Some performances used shock-and-awe tactics, adding weight and sheer volume to Monterverdi’s gorgeous colours. Lionel Meunier, the director of Vox Luminis, takes the view that this music, despite its grandeur, is essentially intimate. The choir was small – only 13 singers – with an orchestra to match.
Meunier himself didn’t take centre-stage on the podium. Instead, he modestly took a position in the bass section of the choir, sometimes urging the performers on, but more often leaving them free to co-ordinate themselves. It was a joy to see how the orchestra would take its cue firstly from the tenor at the front, then from a soprano at the back, then from the organist. When there’s no conductor imposing their will, a group of really fine performers like this soon learns to feel and breathe as one.
The other delightful thing about the performance was the way sensuousness, drama and radiant purity of sound were held in perfect equipoise. When tenor Raffaele Giordani made his passionate declaration Nigra Sum (I am black, but comely), we were hurled instantly from the calm splendour of the preceding Psalm setting into an operatic world.
Later, in the setting of the Magnificat, the ecstatic duetting of the two violins made a perfect foil to the calm radiance of the four sopranos. Meunier cleverly enlisted our eyes to help our ears, by moving the performers around whenever the combination of voices and instruments shifted. By the end, it seemed every aspect of Monteverdi’s inexhaustible masterpiece had been caught in this wonderful performance. IH
European Baroque Orchestra, Saint John's Smith Square ★★★☆☆
The hopefulness of youth, and peace and harmony among the nations; that is what the EUBO represents. For the past 32 years it has taken the best young orchestral players from around Europe, trained them up for a year under the best performers of Baroque music, and sent them off into the profession. It’s given hundreds of superb concerts, and released much-praised CDs.
The EUBO is also a symbol of British entrepreneurial spirit. Like the European Union Youth Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra of Europe it was founded in the UK, and in its early days young British players featured heavily in its ranks.
It was surely only a coincidence that no British players were among the musicians on stage last night. But one couldn’t help seeing this as a gloomy portent of things to come. To avoid the administrative hassles caused by being outside the UK – and to keep the grant-making bodies of the EU sweet - the orchestra is having to leave the UK, and resettle in Belgium.
This concert was the orchestra’s last before it departs. Its Danish musical director Lars Ulrik Mortensen was determined to be up-beat, and the programme was a defiant show of European cultural unity. We had the French-flavoured Concerto Grosso Op 6 no 10 from a German living in London – George Frederick Handel – followed by one of Handel’s Italian cantatas and a scene from his last Italian opera Alcina. After the interval we had J S Bach’s very Italianate Harpsichord Concerto, and to end with, his Wedding Cantata.
It would be good to report that the evening was a musical triumph. In fact it felt oddly tentative. Mortensen’s own playing in Bach’s concerto was as energised and full of rhythmic suppleness as ever. In the other pieces he urged the players on with smiling enthusiasm, and occasionally one caught the glimmer of a smile in return. But there many smudges of articulation and tuning amongst the strings, and the radiant aria that opens the Wedding lacked the spacious calm it needs to really tell.
Guest soprano Maria Keohane was vocally unsure, and this combined with her overdone histrionics as the abandoned shepherdess in Handel’s cantata only added to the evening’s unease. Performers can be fired up by a celebration or by an occasion of solemn mourning; but as this concert proved the unease caused by Brexit isn’t going to summon up the breath of Apollo.
Southbank Sinfonia, Royal Festival Hall, ★★★★☆
Not quite a youth orchestra, not quite a fully fledged orchestra, the Southbank Sinfonia takes a gleeful pleasure in breaking the usual concert mould. It’s a superb training ensemble, which takes the best young players emerging from conservatoires from around the world, and sends them on a rollercoaster ride for a year. Players might find themselves giving free rush-hour concerts with a twist at their regular home of St. John’s in Waterloo, collaborating with artists as varied as Yoko Ono and Guy Barker, or providing music for a National Theatre production.
Given all that, this 15th-birthday concert at the Royal Festival Hall seemed a tad conventional. It didn’t exactly follow the familiar pattern of overture, concert and symphony. But it wasn’t far off, with a contemporary curtain-raiser from American composer Mason Bates, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and a choral blockbuster in the shape of Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast.
Bates’s piece, Mothership, was conceived for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble in which hundreds of players worldwide participate in online performances. Bates found an ingenious solution of how to co-ordinate all those players in their bedrooms, with a strong underlying beat, and a texture made up of innumerable repeating fragments.
The piece evokes the idea of a mothership speeding through cyberspace, which twice “docks” to allow visitors in the form of soloists to embark. The orchestra and its musical director Simon Over brought out the music’s quirky charm and its subtle rhythmic gear-changes. But where was the no-holds-barred improvisatory element mentioned in the programme note? That would have turned a quite effective curtain-raiser into something really special.
Fortunately, the musical temperature rose with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The soloist was Benjamin Grosvenor, and once again he demonstrated that aristocratic ease, commanding technique and and mixture of bravura and refinement that have put him amongst the very best young pianists. The orchestra responded in kind. The wailing clarinet introduction and syncopated brass stabs were energised and raunchy, but not too much; the whole thing felt light on its feet.
There was nothing light about Belshazzar’s Feast. With the combined forces of the orchestra, the Parliament Choir (how cheering to see Brexiteer and Remainer MPs and Peers united in song), plus three other choirs, and the Festival Organ – and the sternly minatory tones of baritone Benedict Nelson – this was a performance that was determined to raise the roof, and succeeded. IH
The Southbank Sinfonia’s next Rush Hour concert is on June 1 at St. John’s Waterloo London SE1. Details: southbanksinfonia.co.uk
Ariodante, Barbican Hall, ★★★☆☆
Ever since David Alden’s boldly theatrical production for ENO in 1993, Ariodante has become one of the most widely appreciated of Handel’s mature operas, and the prospect of a starry cast for this skeletally staged performance under the auspices of The English Concert drew a virtually full house to the Barbican.
Sadly, the main attraction, Joyce DiDonato, scheduled for the title-role, had to withdraw for a minor operation, and her place was taken by Alice Coote, a memorably intense Ariodante at ENO a decade ago.
Sadder still, Coote’s singing of Handel has become increasingly idiosyncratic of late, and here it was at its ugly worst, devoid of a true legato line. Heavy-handed in style, it relied for its effect on fierce gear-changing between chest and head registers, vulgar swooping and scooping in phrasing and effortful delivery of the fast roulades. Her over-emoted accounts of Ariodante’s desolate Scherza infida and third-act mad scene, once so moving, have now become almost risible in their hooting and parping – not, I surmise, what Handel intended and certainly unnerving to listen to. Coote must not go on singing like this.
She met her match for grotesque exaggeration in the Italian contralto Sonia Prina, who played the scheming Polinesso as a pantomime villain, fearsomely butch in a bizarre pair of black lace trousers with white military piping and visible knickers. She too likes roughing this music up, and the biffing aggression with which she attacked it became wearisome.
Consolation was to be had from the remainder of the cast. Mary Bevan, a late substitute for Joelle Harvey, sang with exquisite refinement and delicate charm as Dalinda, building on clean tone notably absent from Coote’s menagerie of weird noises: her final hesitant duet with David Portillo’s equally sweet and elegant Lurcanio was a highlight of the evening. Christiane Karg’s Ginevra was impressive too, though her impeccable polish perhaps erred on the chilly side. Plaudits are also due to Matthew Brook for his vivid portrayal of the King – one of Handel’s richest operatic roles for bass – and upcoming British tenor Bradley Smith as an unctuous and ubiquitous courtier.
Leading from the harpsichord, Harry Bicket conducted the expert band with imperturbable steadiness. Inclusion of the customarily cut dance sections meant that the performance edged towards an excessive four-hour duration and an itchy audience worried about last trains. RC
The Olive Branch: The Choral Pilgrimage 2017, The Sixteen, Old Royal Naval College Chapel, Greenwich ★★★★★
Criss-crossing the country until late November, this year’s Choral Pilgrimage by The Sixteen is being given under the banner of The Olive Branch. More than just a worthy title in worrying times, it traces a thread running through the programme all the way back to a popular French song of the 15th century, L’Homme Armé. In the tradition of the “parody mass”, this “Arméd Man” tune turns up as the basis for elaboration in Palestrina’s Missa L’Homme Armé, heard here alongside other Palestrina works and in juxtaposition with Poulenc.
Even by his own high standards, this is particularly brilliant programming from The Sixteen’s founder-conductor, Harry Christophers. Four hundred years may separate these two masters, both rather worldly servants of the Catholic liturgy, but whereas an entire evening of either Palestrina or Poulenc would need some leavening, here their contrasts prove wholly complementary.
Poulenc, who lived through two World Wars, rediscovered his faith following personal tragedy in the late Thirties, and wrote some of his most important choral music during the bleak war years. Dating from 1941, his Salve Regina, which opens this programme, may be tinged with grief but it also bears the composer’s beautiful harmonic hallmarks. Here, as evening sunlight illuminated the airy Old Royal Naval College Chapel in Greenwich, the choir brought its trademark focus – soaring and sonorously grounded in equal measure – to the music.
This programme also shows how such Marian prayers share something in common with the more obvious sensuality of the Song of Songs. From Poulenc, once described as “part monk, part rascal”, it was a smooth step back to Palestrina’s more obviously profane Surge amica mea. Nor was there any dislocation in moving forward again to Poulenc’s supplicatory Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence, remarkable for their tone painting – especially the dark textures of Tenebrae factae sunt.
Not until the opening of the second half do the tenors and basses actually sing L’Homme Armé, its warlike spirit immediately soothed by the Kyrie of Palestrina’s mass. From there a sequence through Poulenc’s secular Un soir de neige (written at Christmas 1944) and the timeless mysticism of the Agnus Dei from his Mass in G takes us back to the text with which the evening opens. But this time the Salve Regina is Palestrina’s, hauntingly sonorous in a performance that is further evidence of The Sixteen’s impeccable style. JA
The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage 2017 will end at Chelmsford Cathedral on November 25. For more information visit www.thesixteen.com. National box office: 01904 651485.
Karita Mattila, Wigmore Hall ★★★★☆
Tutt and nitpick and raise your eyebrows all you like, there’s no denying that Karita Mattila socks it to an audience through a star quality all too rare on the classical scene today.
Striding out to face the audience with a dazzling smile as though she’s the queen of some marvellous party, this prodigious Finnish soprano, a glamorously dressed and curvaceous Amazonian blonde, radiates intense pleasure in singing, visceral love of the music, and a generous desire to share her joy in herself. How can one resist such gusto?
Well, you could say that she is a creature of the stage rather than the concert platform or recital salon, and that hers is not a temperament or talent cut out to negotiate the finer points of lieder.
Here at the Wigmore Hall, for example, you could sense the diehard connoisseurs shaking their heads with sceptical disdain at her head-on approach, and they have a point: the text was often occluded, some floated pianissimi went awry, and occasionally she came adrift from her splendidly assertive pianist Ville Matvejeff, who was more than a match for her flamboyance.
Hers is not copybook good singing of a dainty or meticulous kind. But the voice is in excellent nick. At the age of 56, after a 35 year career, when most sopranos are fading into a graceful decline, she continues to fire robustly on all cylinders. Once warmed up, she can still sing softly to generate a warm tonal glow and at the climaxes above the stave she raises the rafters without a hint of vibrato or tremolo.
Even more impressive than this is her commitment: whether it’s exuberant gypsy songs by Brahms or the slyly seductive cabaret number by Friedrich Holländer presented as a playful encore, she inhabits what she sings, making it vivid, real, immediate, personal.
At the heart of her programme, sandwiching Berg’s gloomily ruminative songs op.2, were Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and a group by Richard Strauss. The Wagner lacked something of grandeur and gravitas, at least until she reached an impassioned Träume, spun out along a rich legato. Best of all was the Strauss, from the enchanting coruscations of Der Stern to a quietly rapturous Wiegenelied and a magnificent account of Wie sollten wir geheim sie halten.
She’s not so much a great artist as a force of nature: resist it at your peril. RC
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Edgard Varèse, Barbican ★★★★★
As contemporary classical music keeps changing with bewildering speed, so our grasp of the whole picture of modern music starts to become shaky. That’s why the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion series is so valuable. The day-long immersion in the music of a single composer helps us to keep our cultural bearings.
That’s particularly true when – as was the case on Saturday – the composer is Edgard Varèse, one of the giant figures of early musical modernism. Varèse is especially in need of a helping hand. He was fired up by the modern world of skyscrapers and science and machines, and dreamed of a “music of the future”, using new undreamed-off instruments.
What actually survives from these visions is a mere 15 or so pieces, some for small forces, some for huge orchestra, some including electronics and voices. Most of them are rarely played, some never. On Saturday we heard all of them.
What the day taught us is that there’s a lot more to Varèse than pitilessly dissonant evocations of the modern world in earsplitting brass and percussion. There was plenty of that, to be sure, and by the end of the day my ears were starting to ring. But there is also a sultry, nocturnal side to Varèse, which emerged in the afternoon concert from the Guildhall New Music Ensemble.
Soprano Harriet Burns struck just the right tone of tremulous excitement in Offrandes, a setting of erotically surrealist poetry, the ensemble and conductor Geoffrey Paterson touching in a nocturnal soundscape behind her.
In the evening concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, we caught the mystical side of Varèse, in his last work Nocturnal of 1961. The basses of the BBC Singers growled a prayer in some unknown language, while soprano Allison Bell seemed to be in a trance, invoking a crucified deity.
Throughout the concert one could sense conductor Sakari Oramo seeking out the music’s emotional variety. The unexpected dance in Arcana seemed unusually chirpy, the humorous moments in Tuning Up and in the giant orchestral piece Amériques stood out loud and clear. When later in the same piece a long horn melody appeared, floating between giant string chords, one felt the glamour and mystery of a nocturnal cityscape.
The output of Varèse may be tiny, but it was the expression of a great soul, to which this Total Immersion day paid the most eloquent and heart-felt tribute. IH
Hear the BBC SO concert on BBC Radio 3 on Monday May 8 and 30 days thereafter on bbc.co.uk/radio3
Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★★
Hearing a composer’s first and second thoughts side by side can be a fascinating and moving experience. Especially when the composer is Pierre Boulez, grand master of French modernism, and the most obsessive reviser in musical history.
The first thoughts on display here were Boulez’s tiny piano pieces from 1945, entitled Notations. As the lights fell in the Festival Hall, a spotlight picked out a grand piano right at the back of the platform, with the spare, intense form of pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard hunched over it. He flung out the obsessive repeating pattern of the Fourth Notation with terrific coiled energy, at which point the lights rose, to reveal more than a hundred players of the Philharmonia Orchestra seated on the platform. With barely a pause for breath, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen launched them into the corresponding orchestral Notation Boulez teased from that gnomic piano piece, more than 30 years later.
This was the opening gambit in the third of Aimard’s and Salonen’s concert series “Inspirations”, which puts modernist masterpieces together in intriguing ways. On the face of it, they seem very different, the brusque energy of the blonde Finn contrasted with the dark intensity of the French pianist. But the affinities go deeper than the contrasts. As his performances of five of Boulez’s Notations proved, Aimard can summon a taut rhythmic energy, and Salonen showed a truly French sensitivity to orchestral colour, in his performances of the gorgeously ornate and sumptuous orchestral versions.
As if that weren’t fascination enough for one evening, the survey of Boulez was interrupted by glances back to the composer who influenced him perhaps more than any other: Claude Debussy. It was startling to hear the tangled weave of Notations IV dissolve without a pause into the dewy purity of Debussy’s Images, and it made vividly clear how much the later composer owed to the earlier one.
The second half of the concert tried a different gambit: comparing early and late Debussy. Aimard was the soloist in his rarely heard Fantasie for piano and orchestra, which is certainly no masterpiece, but in Aimard’s super-sensitive performance it almost seemed like one. Finally came Debussy’s La Mer. Salonen made the transitions linger deliciously in a way which could have seemed self-indulgent, had his overall command of the form not been so taut. In all it was a marvel. If only every orchestral concert were as imaginatively conceived and beautifully executed as this one. IH
