Cecilia Bartoli and Philippe Jaroussky host an enlightening evening of Baroque ’n’ roll, plus all of June 2017's best classical concerts
We review the best classical concerts of the month
LSO/Trevino Barbican ★★★★
Every Mahler symphony poses a colossal challenge to a conductor, but in terms of sheer size none beats the Third. The first movement on its own is longer than an entire typical Mozart symphony – and after it come five more. Just to hold everything together and maintain a taut energy until the end is a feat in itself.
Robert Trevino, the young American conductor who took over from an indisposed Daniel Harding, showed he has the necessary stamina and authority for the task. And he clearly has an unabashed appreciation for the extremes in Mahler, the squawking fairground vulgarities as well as the spiritual aspiration.
The biggest test comes with the first movement, a strange amalgam of funeral march, forest rustlings and big, beery marches, which some say were inspired by worker’s demonstrations in Vienna. Trevino seemed determined to make the sombre opening as drawn-out and grand as possible – which seems reasonable enough. You could say that a 90-minute symphony needs a grand opening, in the same way a huge statue needs a massive pedestal. But it robbed the opening of momentum, a vital quality in a movement that really needs to sweep us along if we’re not to become uncomfortably aware of just how often Mahler retreads the same ground.
That was the only mis-step – from there on, Trevino had the music’s measure. After the 1st movement, the symphony makes as an ascent through the Great Chain of Being, with flowers in the 2nd movement, then animals in the 3rd, all the way up to the Almighty in the final movement. Trevino negotiated the constant hesitations and surgings of tempo in the delicate 2nd movement with a sure hand. In the 3rd, he gave room for the nostalgic off-stage trumpet melody to breathe, while deftly keeping the orchestral accompaniment together – a real test of a conductor’s skill.
Then, in the 4th movement, came the thrillingly deep tones of Swedish alto Anna Larsson. “The world is deep”, she intoned sadly, while oboist Olivier Stankiewicz made his sad interjections seem dignified and plaintive, rather than exaggeratedly grotesque, as is the fashion these days. After the gleefully naïve hymn to the angels (the London Symphony Chorus and Tiffin Boys Choir on fine form) came the final rapt hymn. Trevino made sure the final affirmation was overwhelming, but the most moving moment came just before, when the LSO’s brass played the hymn-tune with angelic perfection. IH
Telemann 250 Anniversary Concert: Florilegium, Wigmore Hall ★★★
Georg Philipp Telemann is a composer known to all classical-music lovers, but most would be hard-pressed to name even a handful of works from his vast output. Compared favourably in his day to JS Bach and Handel, Telemann (1681-1767) is now in their shadow – but at least the period ensemble Florilegium is fighting his cause, and it marked the 250th anniversary of his death on Sunday with an all-Telemann programme at Wigmore Hall.
The Bach connection is significant, a point of reference in understanding these composers’ relative fortunes. Telemann had been the Leipzig city fathers’ first choice for Kantor of the Thomaskirche, and it was only after he (and one other) declined the job that they turned to Bach. Telemann’s simultaneous music directorship of five Hamburg churches and the city’s opera house might explain why he became probably the most prolific composer in history, and why he sometimes composed by the yard; judged from today’s aesthetic point of view, his pleasant music is less profound – and less austerely Lutheran – than Bach’s.
In a programme that could hardly reflect all aspects of his work (it’s a pity there was nothing from his “style polonais”), it certainly made sense to open with the Suite in E minor from the first part of his magnum opus, Tafelmusik. The sombre overture gave way to a series of sprightly if not very contrasting movements, all played with transparent lightness by Florilegium.
In between pieces that presented these performers with many notes to get through, three works stood out. In the Epiphany cantata “Ihr Völker hört”, mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston, despite being a last-minute substitute, used her glinting tone to demonstrate the remarkable expressiveness of Telemann’s recitatives.
Although Telemann served the Lutheran liturgy well, his music owed more to French style. One of the so-called “Paris” Quartets was included here; following movements marked “Gracieusement” and “Distrait”, the final “Modéré” promised something unassuming but delivered a distinctive richness and pathos missing elsewhere.
As on his newly released Telemann recording, Florilegium’s director Ashley Solomon played the Solo Fantasia No. 9 in E major on a flute that once belonged to King George III, loaned by the Royal Collection. Made by Meissen, this heavy porcelain and gold instrument accompanied the king to Kew in 1789 during his incarceration there due to mental illness. Not believed to have been heard in public before, its slightly glassy tone lent haunting fascination to otherwise ordinary music. JA
More Florilegium concerts and their new Telemann CD: florilegium.org.uk
Cecilia Bartoli and Philippe Jaroussky/Ensemble Artaserse - Wigmore Hall ★★★★
It says something about the changing fashions in opera, and its expanding repertoire, that the biggest vocal stars today are performers of Baroque music. Certainly the star power here at the Wigmore Hall, where Cecilia Bartoli and Philippe Jaroussky teamed up for a programme of Monteverdi, Cavalli and their sometimes still obscure Italian Baroque followers, burned much more brightly than that across town at Covent Garden, where Jonas Kaufmann has been tackling Verdi’s Otello for the first time.
Even better, their programme with Ensemble Artaserse was knitted together with intelligence and flair. The Monteverdi numbers may have been well known, and those by his follower Francesco Cavalli a mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar, but these singers drilled down further into rarities by Agostino Steffani. Interspersing these showy solos and duets were instrumental items by such figures as Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli, Marco Uccellini, Giovanni Legrenzi and Biagio Marini - genre pieces that held the evening together flowingly and allowed the singers a chance to rest.
Such music also suits Bartoli at this stage of her career. Her mezzo-soprano may not be the ripe and vibrant instrument it once was, but her old mannerisms are less intrusive now and her verbal acuity is undiminished. When the evening opened with the Toccata and Prologue from Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Bartoli began to sing “Io la Musica” - “I am Music” - you believed her. Neatly enough, at the other end of the evening, one of the encores was the closing duet from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, “Pur ti miro”, sung so meltingly that true authorship of this disputed number hardly mattered.
Few countertenors sing with more beautiful tone than Jaroussky, who projects an ethereal yet firm sound and shapes long lines with musical intensity. The two artists perform very well together, and in several of Monteverdi’s Scherzi musicali their rapport with the music, each other and the audience suggested Baroque ’n’ roll.
The serious and enlightening highlights were found elsewhere, particularly in selections from no fewer than five Cavalli operas. It was fascinating to hear Jaroussky sing “Ombra mai fu” - the apostrophe to a plane tree later made famous by Handel - from Cavalli’s Xerxes, an opera surely worth reviving. Steffani’s Niobe, revived seven years ago at Covent Garden, supplied Bartoli with a heart-stopping lament, and a battle song (featuring brilliant cornet playing) from the same composer’s Tassilone inspired Bartoli to her old spitfire virtuosity. JA
More concerts in the Wigmore Hall’s Early Music & Baroque Series: www.wigmore.co.uk
Nishatl Khan, Aldeburgh Festival, Suffolk ★★★★
A half-century ago, the West became aware of the great classical music traditions of India, thanks to ardent proselytisers such as Ravi Shankar. Buoyed by hippie culture, the deep-toned Indian lute, or sitar, conquered the world. Then fusion came along, and various Indian forms of the urban pop we call World Music, and the noble classical traditions of India dipped into obscurity once again.
So the appearance of sitar maestro Nishat Khan at the Aldeburgh Festival had a faintly nostalgic ring. Khan is a scion of a great Indian dynasty of musicians, and is determined to keep the flame alive. Not content to give a single performance, he gave three, in each one playing pieces appropriate to the time of day, just as they have done for centuries at music festivals in India. They cast a deep spell.
The two players of tabla, the pair of small drums, came on first, bowing left and right, and the player of the plucked drone instrument, the tanpura. Then Khan himself appeared, in immaculate white. He graciously welcomed his fellow players, and as he began to unfold the raga (a collection of melodic phrases within a particular scale), the other three exchanged appreciative looks at some particularly extravagant bit of improvisation.
All this was familiar from any concert of Indian classical music. What made it special was Khan’s way of giving an ecstatic, yearning quality to the melodic line. He would bend a particular note by pulling on the string, help its flight up into the cool setting of Orford Church with a gesture of the hand and a glance upward, and a look round to the other players as if to say, “that was beautiful, no?” One might have expected a raga suitable for a hot Indian afternoon to be slow and sultry, but this one felt more innocently meditative, with an almost bluesy quality.
The transition to the more rhythmicised section of the composition, the gradual rise and fall of rhythmic excitement, was followed by another rising curve, this time with the two tabla players Hanif Dewaka and Shariq Mustafa – all this was brilliantly handled. Only the final peroration seemed to arrive slightly too soon.
The final concert, based on an evening raga, was more completely satisfying. Khan seized on the flattened note in the scale and filled it with huge pathos, finding a myriad different ways to approach it and then part from it. The intensity was almost unbearable, but Khan found room for humour too, slipping in a quotation from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra had played earlier the same evening. As with his earlier concert, Khan let us down gently with a second piece based on a folk-like melody, which was as moving in its innocence as the stormily tragic piece we’d just heard. IH
The Aldeburgh Festival continues until 25 June; tickets: 01728 687110
CBSO/Gražinytė-Tyla, Symphony Hall, Birmingham ★★★★★
For Steven Osborne’s final concert as this season’s Artist in Residence with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, nothing could have been more appropriate than Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto. A consistent champion of Tippett’s music for the piano, Osborne has made this something of a signature piece, but his magnificent performance also satisfied local pride: it was the CBSO that gave this work its world premiere 61 years ago.
The Scottish pianist is one of today’s most interesting Beethoven players, which makes his affinity for Tippett no coincidence – and no other work illuminates the Beethovenian strivings and idealism of the great British modernist better than the latter’s Piano Concerto. The spirit of Tippett’s musical idol was never far away here in a performance that also caught the work’s own haunting beauty, taking its audience into the enchanted world of the composer’s then recent opera, The Midsummer Marriage.
These aspects were held in perfect balance by the conductor, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, now reaching the end of her first season as the CBSO’s new music director. In music that is always in flux, she exerted absolute control while allowing the score to take its listeners on a mystery tour. The slow movement, modelled on that of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, is a dialogue between soloist and orchestra in which the piano eventually tames everyone else. Osborne’s assertive presence here gave way to virtuosity in the finale, with its fascinating sonorities and bravura energy.
Gražinytė-Tyla’s free-thinking flair also showed in the way she built her programme around the Tippett, turning the conventional concert format upside down. Putting this concerto after interval, she concluded the evening with Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, making firm the connection that Osborne also hinted at in his gentle encore of a Beethoven Bagatelle. Conducting with clarity yet somehow sculpting the music, she delivered the score’s loftiness in a blast of blazing brilliance.
No less daringly, she had opened the evening where many conductors would end – with Stravinsky’s Petrushka (1947 version). Expansive yet taut, her performance was a little less folkloric than some and more attuned than most to Stravinsky’s modernity. Conducting with precision and control of the orchestra’s competing forces, she revelled in the vivid sound of the CBSO in Symphony Hall to deliver a palette much less homogenised than usual. Everything points to Gražinytė-Tyla being the most exciting thing to have happened to the CBSO since Simon Rattle. JA
Listen to this concert on the BBC iPlayer. Gražinytė-Tyla conducts the CBSO in Mozart’s Idomeneo on June 24: cbso.co.uk
Alehouse Sessions, Ageas Salisbury Festival ★★★★★
Music and drink: two things that make life worth living. They’ve gone together since the dawn of time, and puritans have all stripes have always tried to ban them. This terrific concert from the Norwegian group Barokksolistene celebrated one particular moment in history when music was banned in public, but thrived indoors. Dubbed The Alehouse Session, it was an imaginative recreation of the tavern concerts that flourished during the Commonwealth period in 17th-century England, when theatres were closed.
“Vagabonds and sturdy beggars” is how Cromwell described musicians, in one of his various attempts to ban them. The sextet that ambled onto the platform at Salisbury Arts Centre weren’t quite at that level, but they all had a beer in hand and an air of smiling mischief. Violinist and artistic director Bjarten Eike began to toy with a dance, which sounded more folk-like than Baroque. Guitarists Steven Player and Fredrik Bock – both playing on those exquisite tiny Baroque guitars – joined in. Johannes Lundberg added a “slapped” double-bass to the sound. By the time all six were playing, we seemed to be in the middle of an uproarious hoedown.
A scholar would object that this is hardly the right sound for a 17th-century English tavern. On the other hand, English folk music is one source of American folk-music, and who’s to say the slapped bass sound hadn’t been stumbled on in those smoky alehouses? In the end, the performance was so winning that all thoughts about historical recreation simply melted away. The same was true of the Purcell song “Lead me to a Peaceful Gloom”. It was sung by Thomas Guthrie with a rhapsodic freedom, the other players following his every twist and turn like a row of trees bending in unison to the same breeze. It was completely inauthentic, and completely convincing.
Such effortless casualness doesn’t come easy. Barroksolistene have been working on this project for almost 10 years, and the performances had a wonderful sense of being thoroughly lived in. The variety of tone and texture was astonishing, ranging from very naughty folk-songs (puritans hate sex too, so it had to feature at some point), to delicate dance tunes with a modal tang, from as far afield as Shetland and Norway. The whole joyous evening was a liberation, carrying us back to a time when the terms “classical” and “folk” hadn’t yet been invented, and music was simply music. IH
The Alehouse Sessions is at Bush Hall London W12 on June 12 www.bushhallmusic.co.uk. The album is released this month on Rubicon.
Hallé and BBC Phil/Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester ★★★★★
A City United, again. Less than two miles from Ariana Grande’s benefit concert on Sunday evening, the Bridgewater Hall hosted Schoenberg’s gigantic cantata, Gurrelieder, with Manchester’s two professional symphony orchestras, the Hallé choir and the men of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the London Philharmonic Choir.
With its sunset-to-sunrise saga of the doomed love of King Waldemar and his mistress Tove, and of ultimate pantheistic transcendence, Gurrelieder can be almost uniquely uplifting. But it does demand an almost impossible conjunction of talents. Above all, it has to have a conductor who can keep the Richard-Strauss-eat-your-heart-out orchestration in check and look after matters of coordination without fuss. This it had in Mark Elder, whose control over balance and continuity was sovereign. The last time I saw Gurrelieder in the concert hall (under Pierre Boulez, no less) the singers might as well have been miming. This time, their audibility was close to 100 per cent.
Schoenberg also requires singers capable of riding the tsunami of orchestral sound. Step forward the triple male chorus that represents King Waldemar’s vassals in their macabre Wild Hunt. The final Sunrise Chorus was also breathtaking, though it could have done with a few dozen extra sopranos and altos.
Then, it needs six soloists with an almost superhuman combination of power, flexibility, and sensitivity to the words. Here we had a show-stoppingly dramatic account of the news of Tove’s murder, from Alice Coote as the Wood Dove. And we had Graham Clark as Klaus the Fool, bringing all the experience of his innumerable performances of Wagner’s Loge and Mime to bear. Johan Reuter in the role of the Peasant and Thomas Allen as the Speaker also made their mark.
As for the the ill-starred lovers, Brandon Jovanovich had the stamina and most of the vocal colours, but not the ease above the stave and not the detailed identification with the text. His was an admirable yet somewhat generalised account. Emily Magee, on the other hand, had thrilling top notes and made a good deal more of the words, but sometimes at the expense of ideal smoothness of line and tone.
Yet the evening was certainly a triumph for the combined Hallé and BBC Philharmonic, and Tom Allen movingly put its symbolism into words just before the performance. The messages of love, light and collaboration were perfect for the occasion. DF
Concert available for 30 days via Radio 3 website and downloadable via BBC iPlayer Radio
In the Alps, Aurora Orchestra, St John's Smith Square ★★★☆☆
Mountain peaks in general and the Alps in particular have been a rich source of inspiration to composers searching for mystical beauty, but the title of the Aurora Orchestra's latest programme, In the Alps, signalled something completely different. Not quite a breath of fresh mountain air, it was still no bad thing to find that whole tradition debunked by Richard Ayres in his piece entitled "No. 42 (In the Alps – an animated concert)".
British-born but based in the Netherlands (not many mountains there, then), Ayres is a composer who takes his trademark quirkiness to virtuosic heights in this work, ideal for presentation as part of the Aurora's Orchestral Theatre series. Using a collage of film captions, singing and orchestral hijinks, he tells the story of a young girl – the only survivor of a plane crash – who is taught to sing by local animals and whose sounds attract the attention of Bobli, the mute boy from the next valley who can communicate only through his bugle playing.
Under the Aurora's principal conductor, Nicholas Collon, the performers – some decked out in drindls, felt hats and lederhosen – entered into the spirit of things. The soprano Mary Bevan delivered a brilliant catalogue of animal calls, and the orchestra embraced its onomatopoeic role with relish, doing their best for a slightly overindulgent fantasy that loses its trajectory towards the end.
For some time, the Aurora Orchestra's party trick has been performing famous symphonies from memory. Having tackled Mozart and Beethoven this way, they set themselves the even tougher challenge in this concert of doing Brahms's First Symphony without a music stand in sight – a feat that was, on the surface anyway, exciting to witness.
Whether the absence of scores is liberating or extra stressful, it certainly means that the players watch their conductor closely, and communication here between Collon and the musicians was lively. To prevent his players ever looking down and loosing their footing, Collon drove them hard in a performance that more than ever made Brahms's First live up to its "Beethoven's Tenth" nickname. That's certainly one way of approaching this work, but somehow it also seemed as if the players were too focused on not forgetting their notes to think much about the actual sound they were producing, and there was little bloom or real Brahmsian warmth.
The standing ovation was richly deserved, but more for the conquering of a previously unclimbed mountain than for reaching any interpretative peaks. JA
The Aurora Orchestra plays Beethoven's Eroica from memory at various venues this summer. Details: auroraorchestra.com
Britten Sinfonia/Thomas Adès, Barbican ★★★★☆
To undertake Beethoven’s complete symphonic cycle could be seen as an act of hubris. Yet if anyone is up to it, it’s Thomas Adès, Britain’s most tireless, most questing conductor and composer, who has recently finished a successful run at the Royal Opera House with his gutsy reimagining of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.
In the opening concert of his project with the Britten Sinfonia (which will take place over three years), Adès as conductor showed the precise nature of his abilities – by making Beethoven’s tried and tested 1st and 2nd Symphonies seem as fresh and innovative as they must have done when they were unleashed on an unsuspecting public over 200 years ago. Sometimes, Adès showed his cards clearly.
In the 1st, for example, there was the well-defined pizzicato and the strong, percussive expression of its opening movement, and the jolting irregularity of the first few bars of the Allegro Molto. In the first movement of the 2nd, a sense of defiance and determination was strongly characterised by forbidding strings and fluttering woodwind.
Much of the evening’s success was due to the Britten Sinfonia, a fine and often underpraised ensemble from Cambridge who are celebrating their quarter century. They met the demands of Beethoven’s early symphonic eclecticism, while never overdoing the chordal repetition or the vibrato. Thus, the textures and odd juxtapositions were always well delineated. Adès rose to the challenge with gusto, tightly controlling the vast spectrum of sound by keeping the tempi brisk, but letting rip when necessary, and by the end of the 2nd, dominating the stage with what felt like a rather magnificent rage.
But more often than not, the radicalism was caused by something ineffable – a slightly off-kilter serenity in the Larghetto of the 2nd Symphony, an unlinear move towards resolution in the denouement of the 1st.
The evening was slightly marred by its entrée, a composition called Beethoven by the Irish composer Gerald Barry (of whom Adès is an ardent fan) which is based on the Immortal Beloved letter that Beethoven wrote in 1812 to a lady whose identity remains unknown. Here, poor Mark Stone was forced to constantly swap his manly baritone for a theatrical falsetto or a garbled bit of spoken word as long declarations of emotional pain were crammed into short musical phrases. Here was a man possessed, like a musically gifted Doris Stokes. I realise that this demystification of Beethoven’s love letter is meant to be a sign of Barry’s playfulness, but really it just grew tiresome – detaching the listener from the emotional impact of the original material.
Luckily, the two symphonies that followed, rich and exquisitely detailed, were convincing proof that this is a powerful and worthy project. BL
The Britten Sinfonia’s Beethoven cycle continues at the Barbican on Tuesday. Tickets: 020 7382 7320; barbican.org.uk
Hear this concert for 30 days via the BBC Radio 3 website www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
