Manchester and Warsaw

Two concerts in the last few days, from two hard working orchestras. The Warsaw Philharmonic were in Bristol as part of their current European tour. I have several CD’s of music conducted by their Artistic Director Antoni Wit, recorded when he was in charge of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. It was an interesting programme and I was particularly impressed with Sinfonia Rustica by Andrzej Panufnik (1914-1991) which opened the evening. It is well named, spiky music with local Polish tunes and rhythms woven into a tight unrelaxed but fascinating whole, and played with great commitment by an orchestra divided into two sections in continual conversation with each other.

I was less impressed with the accompaniment to the Bruch 1st Violin Concerto which followed, the excellent soloist Kuba Jakowicz, played with a delicacy and finesse which wasn’t equalled by the orchestra. It’s not an entirely convincing work; for me a bit of a jumble, but the way the conductor urged his players to play loudly and coarsely, felt wrong. I’m no musician and perhaps that’s how it looks in the score, but I have heard more mellifluous performances. I felt unable to stay for the second half – Tchaikovsky’s 2nd Symphony, which no doubt would have suited the open- hearted style of the orchestra. I see they repeated the same programme the next night in Warwick. They work so hard, touring orchestras.

Last week Manchester came to Bath. The Halle Orchestra ended the annual Mozart Festival with a quite superb concert of Mendelssohn, Mozart – his 17th Piano Concerto played with poise and appropriate detachment by Imogen Cooper and Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Sir Mark Elder’s reading of the Dvorak made the familiar work sound new. I shall cherish the detail and conviction with which they played the second Largo movement. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Once John Barbirolli saved the Halle from extinction, when he returned to wartime Britain from his six years with the New York Philharmonic. Now Mark Elder – though the situation was nothing like as dire – has given a renewed confidence and recovered virtuosity to the same orchestra many years later.

One caveat however: the venue. The concert was held in Bath’s one substantial hall, an old art deco cinema now owned by a local Christian group. It’s large – all tickets had been sold, which accounted for an audience of 1,700. But the acoustics are not good and access is poor. That the city which celebrates its reputation as a centre of culture with a proliferation of festivals of one sort or another, has never ventured to build a versatile concert hall with the same enthusiasm it has developed its shopping area, is shameful.

But thank you Elder and the Halle for a wonderful evening and a fitting end to this year’s Mozart Festival. They were off to Reading the same evening for a performance the next day!

B.R.

Brahms and Bartok

They are not obvious bedfellows, but they combined to produce an exceptional concert at Bristol last week. *The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under their conductor Krill Karrabits were in fine form, and the partnering of composers from different centuries and cultures but with one influence, made fascinating listening. The first piece on the programme – Brahms Hungarian Dance No.1 -hinted at the connection. Bartok was born in Hungary and was a student of its folk music and Brahms was influenced by Hungarian gypsy music from early days when as pianist he undertook duo tours with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Remenyi.

Brahms Violin Concerto concluded the first half of the concert. The scheduled performer was ill and the Munich born violinist Viviane Hagner was his substitute, taking his place at short notice. What a delight she was and how fortunate we were to have a soloist of such calibre. She played with immense delicacy where that was required in the second movement with its cool beginning from the woodwind, and passionate strength in both the first and last movements. It was a privilege to hear her and I shall look out for her name in the future. A wonderful artist.

I belong to a small ‘University of the Third Age’ music group in Bath. We meet every month, twelve of us, and take turns in presenting a programme of our favourite music on CD’s. Recently one of the group who, in introducing his selection, said that if he was ever invited to choose music on the mythical Desert Island (a BBC programme that has survived many years ), all of the pieces would be by Brahms. I later confessed – to the disapproval of the group -that Brahms is a bit dull for me these days– ‘there is no excitement’ I pompously intoned. Last week’s concert means that I have to radically revise that opinion.

Another sort of Concerto for the second half of the concert – Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, written in only two months and when he was ill and nearing the end of his life in the U.S.A. Surely it is his masterpiece. I know it quite well from an excellent recording by the Montreal Orchestra conducted by Charles Dutoit and Thursday evening’s performance was in the same league. The work is well named, for every section of the orchestra is highlighted at various moments in the five movements. This is music that needs to be seen as well as heard and my eyes travelled from player to player so that I felt I was hearing it for the first time.

B.R.

*I had a letter from the orchestra some days ago. They had to change a programme later in the season because they couldn’t afford the extra players needed for a work by Richard Strauss. That admission must be one of many examples of how the British government’s is blind to the truth that culture is not a luxury but contributes to the wellbeing of national life, presently under great strain.

Proms 2011 (2)

Still a week to go before the series comes to its end, but it came to some sort of catharsis the other night. The Israel Philharmonic with its long-term conductor Zubin Mehta were performing an attractive programme which had guaranteed a full house. I tuned in to the second half, but as soon as the orchestra was seated, shouts from various parts of the auditorium could be heard and the B.B.C. shut down the relay and played recorded versions of the same programme.

I had anticipated that this might happen as apparently the Albert Hall staff did. On arrival the audience were searched. The first half of the concert was interrupted by some thirty protesters around the hall and again after the interval. Apparently the orchestra played on despite the disturbances. It must have been painful for the audience and there were counter boos to try and stop the protesters, who were still around after the concert, some of them being interviewed. Previously they had tried to get he concert cancelled, claiming that the orchestra was complicit “in whitewashing Israel's persistent violations of international law and human rights".

Zubin Mehta, the conductor of the orchestra for many years, said in an interview earlier in the week with the Arab Times, that he hoped Israel would take advantage of the new regimes in the Middle East. “This orchestra has done things that other great orchestras don’t have to do, thank God, but because we find ourselves in this corner here we have to take part in the ebb and flow of the life of the country. Hopefully we will play music very soon in Amman.” The B.B.C. in a press release said that they regreted disappointing Radio Three listeners who were unable to enjoy the full performance. The invitation to the orchestra had been ‘a purely musical one’. A member of the audience said after the concert that you can’t mix politics with music. Both statements are nonsense.

Listening to music–making in this case cannot occupy a realm of its own, totally outside the real world. It can enhance, interpret, hold at a distance sometimes the ugliest experiences of life, but it can’t exist in a vacuum. That is exactly how many Palestinians live, a vacuum of another nation’s creation, looked on anxiously by the Arab states who with various degrees of failure have tried to rectify a wrong, whilst the U.S.A. massively endorses it.

The West-Eastern Divan Youth Orchestra made up of musicians from Israel and Arab countries and founded in 1998 by Daniel Barenboim and his friend, the late Edward Said, is a sign of hope that one day there will be peace and justice in a part of the world where both are lacking.

B.R.

Proms 2011 (1)

The 117th. Season of Promenade Concerts in London’s Royal Albert Hall are coming near to the end, when on September 10th there will be the usual strange combination of popular classics and post-imperial nostalgia.

Seventy four concerts in one venue is an amazing gift to music-lovers able to get to London or to hear on BBC radio with more than ever concerts on TV. And if you can cope with standing in the arena or balcony (as a teenager I have done both) you could have heard all concerts for a mere £190. Such an opportunity for younger people to learn music, though I notice that the aficionados at the front of the arena night after night are not at all young!

I have been able to listen to – and see – some concerts and they have been impressive, with our own national orchestras proving their worth. And it’s good to compare them with such visiting orchestras as the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras from the U.S.A. and the Tonhalle Orchestra from Zurich. I was listening to a repeat of the Swiss performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony this afternoon. It was reviewed well in today’s Guardian, Tim Ashley saying That David Zinman’s direction was ‘all sinew, steel and volatility’.

Most reviews that I have read have been very positive, though I agree with one which criticised Gustavo Dudamel ‘s conducting of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony as extravagantly slow and detailed, robbing it of momentum and coherence. Even so, as with so many of the concerts I have heard, the balance between the sections of the orchestra was exceptional, highlighting the quality of performance and the beauty of the sound.

A concert that I found very moving and the memory of which remains with me was one given by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Bernard Haitink with a wonderful performance of Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto. The rapport between two such experienced musicians and the orchestra was transparent. The dedication, but also the pleasure in making music together, was very special.

There’s more to come and I am particularly looking forward to next Sunday when the great Colin Davis will be conducting the London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra in Beethoven’s Miss Solemnis, in a broadcast and televised performance. The work demands impossibilities from the performers – and a conductor of 84 years of age!

B.R.

Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937)

Szymanowsk is a bit of new discovery for me. I heard his 1st Violin Concerto in Bristol in March; the soloist Nicola Benedetti, and was very impressed with the beautiful, ethereal sound of this work. He has been a generally underestimated composer, but now he seems to be having a bit of a revival with more frequent performances, and he was one of the composers Simon Rattle had an interest in earlier in his career. I have a CD of Rattle and the C.B.S.O. in choral works and recently bought another which includes the 4rd Symphony and both of the two Violin Concertos. (I then discovered that I already have a recording performed by Polish artists and recorded way back in 1988. So much for my memory!) I’ve been playing both versions of the Concerto again, and still have that wonderful over-arching melody which holds the work together in my mind.

Last week I heard the Tokyo String Quartet play his Quartet No. 1 in C major op 37 in a Bath Festival concert. It was tough going, and sitting at the back of the Assembly Rooms in the cheaper seats I could hardly see the performers – and it’s helpful to see as well as to hear the inter-play between members of a quartet. There are several recordings of the piece and I shall try and borrow one from our library; buying new CD’s is a practice I must learn to stop.

For some years Szymanowski was a member – the youngest – of the ‘Young Poland’ group of poets and composers, who believed that Polish music had become isolated and provincial and aimed to publish new music and promote a new national culture. The group was a constant feature of Szymanowski’s life, the friends meeting again for the first time for many years a little while before his premature death through TB, and associating themselves with the composition of his last work, the 2nd Violin Concerto.

I am now listening to the fourth symphony on the new disc which in effect is a piano concerto but with equal emphasis on soloist and orchestra, subtitled symphonie concertante. It’s very vigorous and shows the composer’s confident use of the orchestral palette, as again a busy score reaches for the great over-arching melody which seems so typical of him. Much of his earlier inspiration came from his study of Wagner and Richard Strauss, and although he later moved away from their influence, the richness of their sound remains. In the CD programme note Malcolm Macdonald suggests that Szymanowski’s subsequent interest in the primitive, rhythmically vital, folk music of the Tatra Mountains influenced him in his later compositions.

I wouldn’t know, but the word ‘vital’ sums up my feeling for the symphony and all that I have heard of his music so far. Here is a composer who has something to say, and it’s abundantly worth hearing

B.R.

Birmingham and Frankfurt

I have been present at two excellent concerts recently, in two European cities, with two British orchestras, and two American conductors.

Birmingham’s own City Symphony Orchestra (and I have been one of it’s fans for many years) , was playing in its superb auditorium, Symphony Hall. And in Frankfurt, there on holiday, we were able to hear the splendid Philharmonia Orchestra performing in the Old Opera House, an impressive if rather dour auditorium in the centre of that amazing city. They were half way through an extraordinarily demanding continental tour. It was interesting to compare the acoustics of the two halls – in Birmingham the sound warm but crystal clear, and in Frankfurt to my ears (and I am no expert) a rounded, but less precise sound.

Both programmes had a heavyweight of a symphony after the interval. In Birmingham it was Shostakovich’s 10th. During his years of virtual disgrace, the composer had curbed his enthusiasm for great statements in music, and there had been an eight year gap between this work and his 9th symphony. It was apparently received with great success after its first performance, and in Birmingham was applauded as wildly as a matinee audience of older people as we were, can manage.

There is a sort of Mahler-madness in the musical world at the moment, as the centenary of Gustav Mahler’s death is honoured around the world by many performances of all his symphonies and song cycles. It was his 5th in Frankfurt. In the company of two special people who are not however classical music lovers, I was more than usually conscious – and the acoustics may have contributed to this – of how remorseless the work can sound, especially in the scherzo, despite the interplay between the solo horn, the horn section and the rest of the orchestra. I think all the repeats were played and the pace was often slow, but for me it was a magnificent performance and at its end, my companions agreed!

And the conductors? In Birmingham., Andrew Litton whom I had heard a few weeks earlier in Bristol, where he was conducting the Bournemouth Symphony of which he is now Laureate after some years as its Principal Conductor, a position he now has with the Bergen Philharmonic. Compared to Frankfurt’s conductor he is a young man for Lorin Maazel is now over 80. (see my ‘Ageing’ blog, May 15th ). Slight in stature but commanding in authority, he conducted without a score, revealing his age only by holding on to the rostrum rail sometimes during the performance and walking very slowly off the platform afterwards before returning many times to respond to the applause.

B.R.

Bath International Music Fest 2011

We were in Bath last night for the Festival’s opening ‘Party in the City’, when over 70 amateur musical groups gave free performances in a variety of venues. The town was crowded with enthusiastic people listening to an astonishing line up of talented artists. Street performers, rock, guitar and wind bands, a multitude of choirs, quartets, a trio playing and singing songs from the Great American Songbook, a public school jazz orchestra, operatic singers. The fest turned into a feast of music.

The highlight for us was a performance in the ever welcoming space of Bath Abbey. The traditional procession of young children in fancy dress ended up in the Square facing the Abbey and then preceded by a percussion band, entered the great church, already crowded with audience and performers, the drummers and brass players continuing to herald the music that followed. Joanna MacGregor, festival Director, welcomed everyone and introduced the Brazillian composer and percussionist Adriano Adewale who had been commissioned to present a work he called ‘Talking About Us’, and which he had rehearsed with more than two hundred young people and children over what must have been several weeks.

Through his discussions with children from several city schools, Adewale talked with them about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and asked them what they might include in them. Food, shelter, a safe environment, water, fun time, family education and health care were some of the ideas they shared with him, many matching the list in the U.N. document. Such awareness, he suggests in a programme note, on a deeper level revealed feelings that deserve tender care, are nurtured throughout childhood, teenage years and into adulthood, and point us to a greater and successful life.

So his music developed from these conversations, and had six movements ranging from a tumultuous opening (birth?!), babyhood, lullaby, Family – with a lyric ‘Love loving you’, in which we all joined, Thinking Through, and Rite of Passage. There was a fantastic combination of sounds, enormous emotion, and for me it was all a deeply moving experience. When the half an hour was over,the great door of the Abbey opened, and we staggered out into the warmth of a sunny Spring evening.

I have known about this annual Festival – now over 60 years old – from the days when Yehudi Menuhin was its Director in the late 50’s with a Festival Orchestra that was presumably formed especially for the occasion. They made several recordings. Since then the festival has moved into non-classical genres.

I wonder what he would think of it now? I’m sure he would approve. He appeared as an act in the interval of the 23rd. Eurovision Song Contest in 22 April 1978 with the jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli! He played Eastern music with the sitarist Ravi Shankar and in 1983 founded an International Competition for Young Violinists. In 1990 he was the first conductor for the Asian Youth Orchestra which toured around Asia and Japan.

B.R.