Recital: Haydn, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Fitkin piano works

Steinway Hall

23 October 2013

The Rach Bach partita transcription, played by Yoshio Hamano at this concert. 

The rest of the concert is also available from YouTube. From here.

Interesting recital bookended by classical and modern nearly-mechanical pianism, with a more expressive middle.

The small recital room in Steinway Hall – as with the equivalent in Chappell of Bond Street – ought to present a challenge to programming. Piano works intended for large concert halls are less suitable here.

For his selection, Yoshio Hamano chose promisingly intimate works by Haydn, Brahms and Bach/Rachmaninov though bucked the trend with what sounded like louder works by Graham Fitkin, a contemporary composer new to me.

Pellucid is the word for the performance of Haydn’s Andante and Variations, which was also, to my surprise, the work I enjoyed most here. I suppose this is the standard way of performing Haydn’s piano works, of making them exercises in controlled, abstract pianism derived from Glenn Gould. No doubt this misses the drama of this composer, but in any case the result was extremely charming.

Bach’s third solo violin partita, as adapted by Rachmaninov, is a curiosity. The most pressing question is why bother? The solo piano repertoire is vast; that of the violin much smaller; and if you want transcribed Bach in a romantic idiom, doesn’t Stokowski do a better job?

Perhaps Hamano wanted some baroque music, and it is perhaps more honest to play a Rach Bach than to pretend the German wrote for a piano. The performance was good, though it didn’t erase my recent memory of a performance of the original.

Between these relatively lightweight works came Brahms’ much more substantial Fantasien Op116. This ought to have been the recital’s centre of gravity but it didn't quite work. As I’m not fond of Brahms’ piano music (yet), I couldn’t say if this was inherent in the music, or a consequence of the performance.

Finally, two works by Fitkin, both in a post-minimalist idiom. From Yellow to Yellow is the shorter and more introspective, while Frenetic basically describes itself, though there are passages of subdued come-down. The latter, in particular, seemed incredibly demanding for the performer, but turned him into a machine, which is neither big nor clever. Both pieces were forgettable.

Recital for solo violin and piano

Palau de la Música Catalana

17 October 2013

The venue, designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner.
From here.

A singing solo violin recital of precisely the right length, followed by a less impressive piano recital.

The solo violin repertoire is small, so it made sense for Sara Cubarsi i Fernández shared her concert with pianist Luis Arias; but I also tend to think lengthy solo recitals should be unusual, not the norm.

Here, both artists contrasted an early modernist work with something older, and both made sensible programming decisions. Bartók’s solo violin sonata is to my ears even more poetic than Bach’s third sonata, though less memorable and uplifting, justifying the decision to place Bach second, at the risk of offputting audience members unused to Bartók.

After the interval, Schumann’s peculiar Kreisleriania was followed by Prokofiev’s more bravura fifth piano sonata. But the highlight, for me, was the solo violin section.

The Bartók is wonderful, being both inventive and challenging in the right way, providing a jolt but sufficiently welcoming that any audience can warm to it. Perhaps Bach wasn’t placed second so as not to pose impossible ‘follow that’ expectations after all.

Bach’s work doesn’t seek to challenge the audience, except perhaps in endurance, for we’re not so used to full-sized solo violin pieces. It’s full sized in another way too, given the composer’s ability to give weight through fugal passages.

Between Bach’s time and Schumann’s, we apparently discovered sonata form, and an unprecedented opportunity to create thematically-derived musical structures. Not that I noticed this in Kreislerania, which may be my fault more than the fault of the pianist, though surely the composer must take more of the blame.

A sequence of meandering poetic fragments, sometimes interesting, mostly not; I am probably allergic to the composer, with the exception of his Fantasie. Prokofiev seems a finer composer for the piano, and underrated, or at least underperformed.

Both performers combined musicianship with the technical skill that we shockingly take for granted. But both were upstaged by the venue: it is hard for to compete with the astonishing profusion of visual delights in this hall.

Bach, Bruckner: concert

Royal Albert Hall

6 September 2013

Looking suitably excited, Maazel conducting the finale of Bruckner's eighth, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. 

From here.

Resounding night-before-the Last-Night Prom.

I spent the majority of the Bruckner 8 in a state of rapt attention, in what I imagine would be a suggestible hypnotic state. It is an effect peculiar to Bruckner, and different from the state that, say Gorecki or Glass can induce with their slow or fast repetitions respectively.

Unlike our contemporary long-spanned composers, Bruckner is not exploring a single emotional state at great length. His symphonies are intensely dramatic, in the line of Beethoven, and actually the older school of Brucknerians, archetypally Furtwängler, created a much less rhapsodic effect with extreme tempo fluctuations.

The current tradition in playing these masterpieces is a steady, broad pulse with emphasis on projecting their astonishing grandeur. As happens here, this risks downplaying the significance of the final climax of the first movement, a moment of terrible crisis which haunts the following two movements and is only resolved after a struggle in the finale.

In other Proms concerts, some members of the audience applaud particular movements, and this is understandable. Here, I doubt anyone imagined applauding until the end of this enormous work, and this could either reflect the exhaustion we feel after each movement, or our awareness that the symphony must obviously continue, to resolve in some way.

The Royal Albert Hall felt saturated with sound, a wondrous experience, and I assume that conductor Lorin Maazel must take some credit for this, as the ‘sound’ of a work is one of the areas in which he is highly regarded. I imagine the Vienna Philharmonic could play this music in their sleep, and so deserve even more of the credit.

The finale is a great challenge, and part of this is because Bruckner must have found it formidably difficult to compose, much as he later did with sketches of a finale for his ninth. What can properly relieve the previous three movements, most especially the intensity of the preceding slow movement?

I didn’t notice any great difficulties in the tricky transitions in the finale, though I did wonder if Maazel had really plumbed the depths and heights in the slow movement. But the only serious blemish was the trio in the second movement, driven too hard and fast.

The first part of the concert was almost inevitably obliterated in comparison, but was a thoughtful example of programming: Bach organ works and transcriptions, played by Bruckner’s current successor as organist in St Florian.

Klaus Sonnleitner grappled with the unwieldy brute of an organ, hardly optimised for Bach, and produced excellent results. His encore was much better suited to the instrument, but that didn’t matter. The sense that Bruckner was at the organ, as indeed he was in 1871, was a magical prelude to what I believe is the greatest of orchestral works.

Matthew's Passion

29 March 2013

 

'Mache dich mein Herze rein', sung by Thomas Quasthoff.

An attempt at reproducing a performance Bach might have heard proves less than authentic regarding the truths of the work itself. 

This performance was something of an extreme in period practice, and while it was worth experiencing, it didn’t capture the greatness of this masterpiece. 

Apparently replicating the conditions of a 1729 vespers performance arranged presumably by Bach himself, there was a thought-provoking sermon before part two, and congregational hymns before each part. This conceit worked until the end, when not only was there another hymn, but a motet also, which while beautiful quite ruined the supreme finality of the Passion’s ‘Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder’. 

Even if this gross artistic blunder was actively approved, rather than endured, by the composer, that would be no reason for repeating the mistake now. 

Listening to a back-slapping celebration of historically-informed performance on BBC Radio 3 today, I could appreciate that the effort to perform works as the composer might have expected to hear them has been beneficial; but in this Passion, at least, there are surely various satisfying ways to perform it, and the larger, more romantic performances of old take the work more seriously. 

This is the grandest, most solemn artwork in our tradition. Listening to it with reduced forces (choral, vocal and orchestral) gives a sense of lightness and vigour more appropriate to the Messiah. Contemplating the meaning of Jesus’ death – avoided entirely in Handel’s masterpiece – brought out the weightiest side of Bach, and this should be reflected in performance. 

Perhaps a faster Passion, timewise, is considered sensible. But this avoids the challenge to the conductor and performers, for the great slow Passions of old recordings do not seem to take longer than the faster versions. It’s one of the oddities of music. 

This Passion got off to a terrible start, with an opening chorus that sounded light and chaotic, whereas when done differently it can be overwhelming, and yet somehow, magically, not so overwhelming that the rest of the work suffers in comparison. 

Certainly the rest of the work was an improvement in this performance, and generally the solo arias and recitatives did benefit from the intimacy of the setting. 

My feelings were mixed over the chorales. The setting made sense of them: the sense of a congregation was clear. But they were treated perfunctorily, whereas in better performances they add cumulatively to the Passion’s effect. 

And what is that effect? The sermon helpfully highlighted Jesus’ basic passivity. He is not a tragic figure in the usual sense – as he says, he could escape his fate anytime he wanted to.  

The mystery of this fate, whether his sacrifice is needed, his anguish both in Gethsemene and on when crucified, are captured both in the apostle’s text and in the surrounding enhancing meditations, but most of all in the music. 

So the effect is tragic, powerfully so. But there is also hope, most wonderfully expressed in arias such as ‘Mache dich, mein Herze, rein’. 

What hope there might be, after such passively accepted cruelty, whether necessary or not, is mysterious to me. But I think it is the central mystery of the Christian faith, and in addressing it directly, and so wonderfully, this Passion is the most effective expression of that faith, so far as I have experienced. 

With a work of such importance, I should not overly complain about how badly this well-intentioned, interesting performance served it. The piece seems to me indestructible, and in any particular hearing criticism takes second place to grateful experience.