Articles
Proms 2002
When there's a particularly warm and dry summer is it a manifestation of climate change or just a particular and unique event? Whatever the meaning, the 2002 Proms concerts seemed to be the least new music friendly in a long time--maybe ever. Even though there were still more works than would be scheduled in any comparable series in the United States, the relative paucity of newer works, particularly of a modernist style, was striking. This was especially true in August, when I was in London and was able to hear concerts. A secondary attraction of the Proms, the showcasing of British music, also was less a factor in the season's programming than in past years. There was no piece by Peter Maxwell Davies for the second year, and there were also no pieces by Harrison Birtwistle. Despite the fact that it was his seventieth birthday year, there was no piece by Alexander Goehr. (Oliver Knussen, recently described by the New Yorker as the greatest living English composer, did receive a celebration of his 50th birthday, however). I did not hear any of the four Proms Commissions (from Anthony Payne, Joseph Phibbs, David Sawer, and Mark-Anthony Turnage), but reports from people who did were not particularly enthusiastic. Despite the lack of newer music, older music--twentieth century classics--were very much in evidence. A number of pieces were interesting and satisfying and the performances were always of a very high level, but there was, nonetheless, a kind of pallor over things in comparison to past years.
There used to be a way that performers would play pieces that they didn't trust. Most aspects of a piece--dynamics, lines, tempi, and so on, would be very excessively exaggerated. This amounted to a kind of oversell, more or less the equivalent of mugging. Ultimately it would produce a performance which was much more about the performer than it was about the piece being performed. Nowadays a lot of people play that way all the time anyway. This playing can be very fine, even wonderful, it just isn't about anything more than itself. This would seem to be the case with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, lead by Richard Tognetti in their concert on August 14, in which they were joined by the BT Scottish Ensemble in a program of English String Music. Most people seem to find no need to doubt that either the Elgar Introduction and Allegro or the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme of Tallis will come off, and it's hard to believe that this band did, but their playing was so exaggerated as to suggest that concern. The Elgar and Vaughan Williams held their own against that kind of treatment; the Tippet Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, which is already at pretty high level of ecstatic existence, didn't fare quite as well. The most enjoyable and interesting part of the program for this listener was a set of collective variations on Sellinger's Round, an Elizabethan tune, organized by Benjamin Britten for the 1953 Aldeburgh Festival. One seldom or never hears music by some of the people included: Arthur Oldham, Lennox Berkeley, or Humphrey Searle, and it was good to encounter it. All of the variations were, at the very least, something that one wasn't sorry to have heard. The variations by Tippet, Searle, and Walton were much more than that.
On August 19, the Australian Chamber Orchestra returned. Their playing that night seemed to be much more concerned with projecting a substance which they found in the music. They provided serious and persuasive performances of the Janacek First Quartet (arranged by Richard Tognetti) and the Walton Sonata for Strings. Their performance of the Shostakovich First Piano Concerto, with the pianist Olli Mustonen and Alison Balsom playing the obligato trumpet part, was cheerful and spiffy. They also presented Nourlangie by Peter Sculthorpe, which was a serious and seriously evocative work, played with dedication and passion. They were joined in this performance by the guitarist John Williams. This second concert was on an altogether different
level of music making than their first.
The first of the Australian Chamber Orchestra's performances was a late night concert, following the BBC Symphony and Pierre Boulez. Their program joined two early Boulez pieces (one of which, Le visage nuptial, had been played by these same performers on the previous summer's Proms) with Integral by Varese and the 1911 version of Petrushka by Stravinsky. Both of the Boulez pieces are elegantly composed and received rapt, magisterial, highly polished performances. It would have been very interesting to be able to compare this version of Le visage nuptial, dating from 1989, with the original 1946 version for soprano and alto soloists, piano, percussion, and two ondes martnots. My hunch is that the original version is more satisfying. According to the notes, Boulez left the microtones which were in the earlier versions out of the final one because their difficulty would limit the number of performances. It's hard to imagine that anybody who had the money, ability, interest, and wherewithal to do the piece in first place (the final version being for two soloists, a women's chorus, and an enormous orchestra--without even one ondes martinot) would be put off by a few microtones, but who knows. As it turned out in this concert, the simplest of Boulez's music, the soprano solo from the other work, Le soleil des eaux, was by far the most satisfying. Neither piece seemed quite as pleasing as the chamber works Memoriale and Derive, which were on a Composer Portrait concert earlier in the evening. The Varese, although played very well, was swamped in the hall and didn't make much effect. The performance of Petrushka, although highly polished, did what it would have seemed impossible for a performance of Petrushka to do: it was dispirited and dispiriting.
The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, fresh from a run of doing Parsifal at the Edinburgh Festival, played at the Proms on August 22. They were conducted by Claudo Abbado and joined by Martha Argerich. They are not a youth orchestra in the usual American sense, which is to say pre-college, but they are rather a training orchestra, like the New World Symphony; the players are all students or graduates of College level music schools in Europe, and the youngest of them was 20. They obvious rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and they sound fabulous. Their performances of the Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste, and Debussy's La mer combined thoroughly refined playing with a passionate involvement with the music, and were really wonderful. As musically complex, completely engaging, and thoroughly right as Martha Argerich's playing was in the Ravel G major Concerto, it was overshadowed by the vivid and idiomatically jazzy playing of the winds, which was worthy of Django Rheinhart. It had just the right very French quality of playing and presented the piece as a very French Rhapsody in Blue.
The conducting of Joseph Swensen and David Robertson, both American, each with his regular orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Orchestra National de Lyon, respectively, on August 15 and August 23, respectively, was a study in contrast. One might wonder exactly what Swensen's gestures were intended to convey to his players (although whatever it was, they certainly seemed to get it), whereas Robertson's very contained motions were square on the beat, and always perceptible as such. Both of them featured Sibelius: The Swan of Tuonela and the First Symphony, and the Fifth Symphony, respectively. Swensen's performances were fluent, lovely, impassioned, and persuasive. Robertson, as far I could tell, was attempting to play the Sibelius exactly as he would have played Mahler, particularly with always fluid and changing tempi. It's an interesting idea, and one which would never have occurred to me. It also didn't, for my taste, work very well. Since much of the piece, especially the first movement, in which two movements from the first version of the piece were merged, depends on differing but related and carefully calculated tempi which are important for the projection of the form, messing around with the speed of the beats undercuts the substance of the work. It would have been much better to have taken Stravinskian performance practice as the model. Robertson's concert also included an intense and loving performance of the Berg Violin Concerto, with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist, a lovely performance of the Ravel Pavane, and a perfunctory, albeit colorful, reading of The Song of the Nightingale by Stravinsky.
August 25 offered one of the major events of the Proms, Sofia Gubaidulina's Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ according to St. John. The performance was given by St. Petersburg Chamber Chorus and Orchestra of the Kirov Opera, conducted by Valery Gergiev. The story of the Passion is uniquely compelling and almost unbearably terrible and awesome, and Gubaidulina enhanced its powerful effect by combining it with St. John's account of the Apocalypse from the book of Revelations. The Passion story is assigned to Bass and Tenor soloists and the Apocalyptic portions entrusted to Baritone and Soprano soloists, with various choral components participating in both. Each of these elements is given timelessly motionless music, based on chant, with an orchestral accompaniment which is full of bell sounds (and bells themselves) and heavily features brass. The work itself, despite the static quality of much of its elements, is not at all lacking in movement and sweep. Its tempo is that of the rhythmic interaction, over a vast time scale, of the different elements themselves. Like the story, the sweep of the work is inexorable, irresistible, and almost completely overwhelming. It hour-and-a-half length seems to pass quickly and at the same time to have been unending.
According to the program, Gubaidulina, knew while she was writing the Passion, which had been commissioned by the International Bach Academy in Stuttgart to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the death of J. S. Bach, that she would follow it with the Easter Story. It's really too bad that she did. One left the performance of the Passion for intermission thinking that this was a masterwork of Russian music that could be considered to be on the same level with Boris Gudunov and only a few other pieces. When the whole concert was over, the stature of Passion seemed to have been great diminished by the addition. Just as she intertwined the Passion with the apocalypse, Gubaidulina allegedly joins the Easter story with that of the Last Judgement. The strategy works much less well in the Resurrection portion for two reasons: the story becomes less inherently dramatically coherent and compelling, and, whatever the claim, we're still at the Apocalypse--there's really no judgement. Possibly because of the greater dramatic looseness of the text or possibly because of reliance on the same means of musical organization with no change, the Resurrection seems very much as though it's just more of the same, which presumably was not the goal. Whatever the ultimate disappointment in the end, nothing can change the greatness of what Gubaidulina accomplished in the work or one's gratefulness for having encountered it.
In a show of what must considered something like super-human strength, Gergiev had conducted a performance of Boris Gudunov the night before the performance of the Gubaidulina and followed it that night with another concert with the Kirov Orchestra containing the Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto, with Alexander Toradze, and the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony. The level of the performances were equal to that of the Gubaidulina. The Shostakovich, withdrawn before its first performance due to Shostakovich's Stalinist censure of 1936, was something of a novelty. Although as brilliantly orchestrated and dramatically presented as any of the other Symphonies, and containing much really wonderful music, the Symphony is in fact a little scrappy and uneven, and the world probably wouldn't have missed all that much if it had not ever resurfaced.
As part of the focus of this summer's Proms on things Spanish, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Alexander Briger, offered a late night Prom, which included Osvaldo Golijov's Last Round and Simon Holt's Canciones. Golijov's work was a tribute to Astor Piazzola and a souvenir of a performance of Piazzola's which Golijov heard in La Plata, Argentina, when he was a child. . Scored for two string quartets, the work both imitates the sound of the bandoneon and recreates a sort of boxing match between the two quartets. The music is attractive without being either as compelling or as interesting as some of Golijov's other works. Simon Holt's work, which sets poems by Federico Garcia Lorca along with folk poems which Lorca collected for a virtuoso mezzo-soprano (in this performance the admirable Jean Rigby), is dark and profound, mimicking through his own personal musical language the forms and idioms of folk music. Despite its being greatly satisfying and its being clearly, cleanly, and eloquently presented by the performers, one would never for a moment believe that Holt actually understood Spanish or set the text on anything other than a syllable by syllable basis.
At the age of 32 Thomas Ades is already a grand old man of current British music, and one of its major figures. He conducted a concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra on August 29, which offered excerpts from The Trojans by Berlioz, Sibelius's Kullervo Symphony, and his own America (A Prophecy). The performances of the Sibelius and Berlioz can probably most accurately be described as having been adequate. One perceived the score and power of the Sibelius without the excitement which a more eloquent performance might have generated, and the delicacy and finesse of the Berlioz were there. Their presence on the program was thematic: both tales of the terrible rewards of hubris and evil acts. This was apparently to set the stage for Ades's own work. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic in 1999 as a Œmessage for the millennium,' the work sets Mayan texts, along with Spanish and Latin writings. It predicts dire things: subjugation, destruction, and fire, which are rewards for decadence. The idea that the native peoples of Central and South America were, due to their moral corruption, deserving of the treatment the received from their Spanish Conquerors is a novel one, to me anyway. Whether an extremely successful young man at the very center and height of social and musical power politics in a post-imperial civilization is in a position to deliver sermons about the dangers and deserts of decadence (or whether such a person is just the one to do so) is debatable. The assertion which was made by the program notes that this work was prescient or prophetic of September 11, 2001, however, is glib and simply offensive, since it implies that those attacks were justified, and justified merely by the decadence of American society. Surely few people other than Jerry Fallwell and Osama Bin Laden would endorse such an idea. Putting aside all that extra-musical political baggage, the work itself is vivid and lively, made with considerable skill and features masterly orchestration. The beginning, an orchestral introduction to the first dire warnings of the mezzo-soprano soloist, is particularly powerful and striking. The first entrance of the chorus, representing the conquerors, who apparently have a mandate from God, is less so. It was hard to tell why there were supposed to be two movements and what made the second faster or more intense than the first, but those are small quibbles. It was hard for this listener to regard it with anything other than a sort of mixed admiration.