Iciness and mystery in Cardiff, plus the best of October’s classical and jazz concerts
National Orchestra of Wales, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff ★★★★☆
Some contemporary composers can only work by hints or allusion. They pile up fascinating ear-saturating complexities, but nothing is ever quite stated out loud.
This engrossing concert of recent British music from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales had two such pieces. The first of them, Helen Grime’s Lumina, was a brilliant evocation of a beautiful frozen world, inspired by a strange Norwegian novel of the 1960s entitled The Ice Palace. Though the landscape is frozen, the emotional world becomes increasingly heated, as a young girl roams through ice-caves in search of her lost friend. The airy, bejewelled sounds of the opening, disturbed only by a tremor of foreboding in the bass drum, became increasingly freighted with anxiety. After a desperate climax, the music subsided to an unexpectedly roseate glow, with three solo violins entwined in uneasy communion. Was this a resolution or the prelude to more terror? It was hard to say.
By comparison with that burning iciness, Michael Zev Gordon’s Violin Concerto, first heard at a Prom in 2017, seemed suffused through-and-through with warm humanity. But it too expressed a sense of something that couldn’t be quite said out loud. The perilously high two-note repeated phrase at the opening was played by soloist Carolin Widmann with rapturous sweetness, but also a stifled quality, as if couldn’t “speak”. Though the piece roamed far and wide, with a slow movement and a tenderly dancing scherzo, it kept coming back to that opening phrase. The whole piece felt like an attempt to unlock the mystery of this phrase, but the final frustrated repeated notes seemed like an admission of defeat: moving, in its way.
Then came something different: a piece that was abrupt, direct and had absolutely no truck with fluttering uncertainty or soft edges. This was the world premiere of The Master Said by Alexander Goehr, who in terms of age if nothing else (he’s now 89) counts as our senior composer. He’s always been attracted to the mysterious sayings of Confucius, and this piece offered eight of them intoned by actor Mark Lewis Jones, each prefaced by the phrase “The Master Said”.
Goehr’s piece offered a commentary on each saying in the form of little gnomic phrases, beautifully shaped by the BBC NOW under Catherine Larsen-Maguire’s firm but flexible direction. Sometimes a pithy flute phrase would be passed quickly to muted trumpet, both in dialogue with an invigoratingly stubborn repeated chord. Sometimes the whole ensemble was drawn into a brief assertion of knotted intensity before dwindling suddenly to a solo viola, and then silence. Like the sayings themselves, this piece was lucid yet enigmatic, and a reminder that art does not have deal in mystification to be mysterious. IH
Stephen Hough, Festival Hall, London SE1 ★★★★☆
Stephen Hough is a very English sort of piano virtuoso; quietly elegant in appearance, even a touch monk-like as he frowns pensively at the keyboard, not given to gazing up to heaven for inspiration in the impassioned moments.
But when he plays he can rival any of those flashy pianists with fascinating foreign names who look romantic on a CD sleeve. And he has something many of them don’t, a humane awareness that music can appeal to us at different levels of seriousness. Hough has published award-winning volumes of essays which show a deep appreciation of his art, but he also likes to tweet about his favourite puddings.
At this recital we were offered both the depth and the pudding, the latter right at the end (where it should be, of course) in the shape of a delicious Cançion y Danza by Catalan composer Federico Mompou. Its sensuous harmonies were touched in by Hough with the kind of insinuating grace that can make something very slight seem almost deep. There were more moments of Iberian sweetness earlier on in the middle movements of Hough’s own Partita, though they were overwhelmed by the flashily grand outer movements, which seemed poised somewhere between a French organ-loft and a French café. A more overtly swaggering performance might have made these even more impressive.
Compared to that the Bagatelles composed in 1938 by the now sadly neglected English composer Alan Rawsthorne were more austere, though Hough softened their edges just enough to make the austerity seem eloquent. It was startling to pass from that straight to the hard-edged bitter fury of Schumann’s Kreisleriana. The guiding idea of the piece, which is the clash between the two sides of Schumann’s character, often comes across as romantically picturesque. Here it felt disturbing, as if the two sides were so far removed from each other they could actually split apart. The relentless off-beat accents in the first movement were like a musical portrait of frustration, and the central dreamy section didn’t seem like a real respite. It was too nervous and intense, as if aware that the hectic opening music could burst in again at any moment. The second movement came as an escape into a dream-world, Hough’s numerous hesitations in tempo done with perfect ease, before obsessiveness came back in the following movement. It was a marvel, and only the stealthy goblin-dance of the final movement seemed a touch effortful.
Most interesting from the point of view of performance was the group of four pieces by Chopin, but not because Hough did things that were overtly original. On the contrary these performances of two famous Nocturnes, the 2nd Scherzo and the 3rd Ballade all shared a refreshingly open and simple straightforwardness, despite Hough’s numerous subtleties at the level of detail. Chopin is often thought of as the quintessentially indoors composer but Hough seemed determined to lead the music out-of-doors, another sign of the humane balance that—Schumann’s weirdness aside—was the hallmark of this wonderful concert. IH
Colin Currie Group/Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆
In any musical performance the players’ body language and the resulting sounds reinforce one another in a way that’s peculiarly satisfying. A surprising, tense chord seems much more so when we can see the tense, crouched gesture that produced it.
With the music of Steve Reich, the now venerable co-creator of musical minimalism, the relationship is very different, as last night’s all-Reich concert from the Colin Currie Group demonstrated. Reich’s dancing, endlessly repeated patterns aren’t overtly expressive, so there are no meaningful gestures, no interesting states of soul expressed through one exquisitely placed note accompanied by a pensive look. It’s all about perfectly smooth co-ordinated movement, executed with the easy, dancing precision of a basket-ball player making for the net.
On that level, this group is supreme. Watching them in action during the four pieces, one understood why they’ve become Reich’s favourite performers. The concert launched off with his recent work Running, scored for a small body of stringed instruments, high winds, pianos and percussion — the typical Reich sound. Currie forsook his usual place at the marimbas and drums to conduct from the front, but his vehement gestures were just as remorselessly metronomic as they are when he’s playing. The piece began with a mechanical pattering in the two pianos that for a second or two recalled Stravinsky’s Petrushka before shifting into Reich’s dark harmonic world, suggestive of the incessant activity and nocturnal glamour of city streets.
Like many of Reich’s recent pieces it seemed a chip off the minimalist block, engaging, beautifully proportioned, but not especially distinctive. The brand-new piece Traveler’s Prayer was something else. Inspired by three Biblical texts added to the Traveler’s Prayer found in Jewish prayer books, it foreswore Reich’s incessant hammering entirely in favour of an austere play of slow melodies underpinned by deep piano basses.
But that created a problem. Deprived of the athletic physicality that makes Reich’s music such a joy, what were the performers to do? Play the long sustained notes with perfect, neutral precision, was the answer. It was a weird and not very joyous experience to see the four singers of Synergy Vocals sing so inexpressively and with such a flat pinched sound that it was often hard to tell who was performing and who wasn’t.
After this curious experiment it was a relief to return to Reich’s familiar musical world in the Quartet of 2013. Here the rhythmic pattering took on an overtly jazz-like flavour with lots of syncopations and sudden pauses, beautifully embodied by the performers (one of whom was Currie himself, now more at ease at a marimba). Even better was the final performance of Tehillim from 1981, a setting of lines from four Psalms in Hebrew. The pattering of drums and maracas, the dancing melodies in the voices, and finally the silvery chimes combined to give a sense of suppressed joy, which under Currie’s urgent direction finally threw off suppression and became ecstatic. It was an utter marvel, which seemed both contemporary and unfathomably ancient. IH
Bath Festival Orchestra, Kings Place, London N1 ★★☆☆☆
The Bath Festival Orchestra certainly has a name to conjure with. It was founded in 1959 by Yehudi Menuhin to be the resident orchestra of the Bath International Festival, and made some treasured recordings with him over the next decade.
Now it’s been reborn under the violinist-turned-conductor Peter Manning with a very high-flown mission to take music to diverse audiences “in overlooked communities”, as well becoming involved with new ways of enhancing the concert experience through virtual reality. You might think that at its London debut the orchestra would want to highlight some of these aims, but there was no sign of diversity on or off the stage, and certainly nothing in the way of virtual reality. It was a straightforward chamber orchestra concert with an intriguing programme and a fine invited soloist – though the array of fresh young faces hinted that being a training orchestra is a further aim.
Nothing wrong with that, of course, and the evening certainly had its enjoyable moments. It was good to hear Ralph Vaughan Williams two gently ecstatic and rarely-heard Hymn-Tune Preludes, even if the playing seemed tentative at the outset. The Serenade by doughty suffragette-composer Ethel Smyth turned out to be a delight.
You might say that it was stylistically uncertain, with a Brahms-like harmonic and timbral mournfulness that would veer suddenly to a Mendelssohnian lightness, laced with delicious flute solos from Frederico Paixão. But that’s to fall into the trap of evaluating little-known composers by always comparing them with the Great Masters, instead of enjoying them for their own qualities – which in the case of Smyth are considerable.
There were stylistic echoes too in the Clarinet Concerto by Helen Grime from 2009, where the soloist was that terrific player Julian Bliss. Here, the echoes were much more recent, with a very obvious debt to the Frenchified, decorative modernism of Pierre Boulez. Flurries of nervously intense melody from the soloist were caught and held in a web of trilling sounds in the string quartet, with muted trombone and thrummed harp adding a touch of menace.
Here, with a reduced orchestra that showed off the orchestra’s principal players together with an excellent soloist, one felt the concert actually rising to the level it aspired to. Unfortunately the closing piece, Haydn’s radiant and rumbustious final Symphony No 104, was several notches below. One felt that Peter Manning’s energised but somewhat impressionist beat sometimes took the players by surprise, and there were some uncertain entries and tuning issues – plus the fundamental problem that the body of strings was too small to balance the winds.
But an even more basic problem is the orchestra’s identity issue. Is it a chamber orchestra aspiring to play at the highest level, a training orchestra like the Southbank Sinfonia, or something else entirely – a community resource, working in areas classical music never reaches? Whichever of these roles it chooses, the Bath Festival Orchestra faces stiff competition, and it can shine only when it decides what it truly wants to be. IH
Diana Damrau, Wigmore Hall ★★★★☆
Diana Damrau stepped onto the Wigmore stage on Tuesday night to a storm of cheers and whistles, the like of which one rarely hears in that hall. It was a rapturous welcome for this extraordinarily generous and intelligent German soprano, who throws herself recklessly into whatever role she takes on, and incarnates the troubled souls of those tragic Tudor queens in Donizetti and Bellini to perfection.
She was especially generous at this recital, which saw her tackle a huge programme of German Spanish and French song despite audibly suffering from a lingering cold. When the early Strauss song Freundliche Vision (a Happy Vision) didn’t have quite the smooth ecstatic quality she was aiming for she made a gesture of exasperation, explained that the song had come round when she wasn’t quite ready for it (singers don’t forget their songs, but they sometimes forget the order in which they’re coming) and sang it again. It wasn’t flawless the second time either, but she achieved that focused sound and mind that seduces the ear and melts the heart.
This was towards the end of an evening during which she and her superb accompanist Maciej Pikulski had already visited hugely contrasted regions of sound and feeling. They launched off with Robert Schumann’s Frauenlieben und -leben (A Woman’s Love and Life) a song-cycle that pictures a woman’s rapturous submission to a man, in verse penned by a man. It’s a dubious premise these days, and all that breathless adoration seems mawkish anyway, but the flaring intensity in Damrau’s voice made it real by suggesting the adoration was as much earthy and carnal as spiritual.
She’s a wonderful actress as well as singer, and sometimes lengthened the pauses between songs so she could transform the mood through a change in look and demeanour. The starkest change came before the last song, where breathless excitement gives way to stony grief at the beloved’s death, a change Damrau registered eloquently before a note had been sung.
The erotic strain that lay under the surface in Schumann’s songs shone out with full force in the set of songs by Henri Duparc that followed, tinged with a lovely sunset melancholy. In Soupir (“Sigh”), that luxuriant flaring of the tone that is Damrau’s trademark took on a different emotional hue, as the lover thinks of his beloved but finds that he’s only embracing a void.
After the interval, the mood lightened for a set of Spanish song. Or rather it should have done, but the flirtatiousness and mock-imperious flourishes of the songs (imagine one arm flung high and a carnation held between the teeth) felt slightly effortful. If you’re feeling a bit under par, perhaps it’s easier to inhabit a feeling of tragedy than to be Carmen. In the final set of early, tender love-serenades by Richard Strauss, she seemed absolutely at ease. In Wiegenlied (Cradle Song) the exquisite piano shimmer conjured by Pikulski and the beautifully sustained vocal line of Damrau were perfectly matched, right up to the tenderly moulded pause at the end. IH
Jason Moran & Christian Mcbride, Wigmore Hall ★★★★★
You know musical life is getting back to normal when jazz musicians tease each other, pull off rhythmic surprises with a complicitous glance, and schmooze the audience outrageously. All that was missing during the lockdown, when jazz fans had to make do with streamed concerts, which were sad, ghostly affairs. I saw one gig streamed from New York where the players were reduced to bantering with an empty hall.
How different things were on Wednesday night. The normally reserved Wigmore audience, fortified by eager young jazz players eager to pick up a few tricks, cheered and whooped to welcome two visiting American star players, pianist Jason Moran and bassist Christian McBride. They assured us that this was their first-ever duet gig together, which seemed hard to believe – the interplay between them was so easy and yet so razor-sharp, and so ready to go off at surprising tangents.
One of the things that made the gig treasurable was the way the whole of jazz history seemed to pass before us, without any didactic intent, out of sheer joie de vivre. The two players kicked off with a version of Thelonious Monk’s Blue Monk done as a lazy swing, an idiom many younger jazz musicians nowadays seem to regard as a slightly embarrassing relic. It was fascinating to hear a now ancient piece (in jazz terms) carried back in time to a style that was already antique when it was born. McBride’s rock-solid bass was simplicity itself, while Moran teased and feinted at the melody.
Later, during what McBride described as a “Mingus Mash-up”, the pair ventured into free jazz, Moran’s unleashing tumultuous vollies across the keyboard while McBride provided a thunderous undertow of sound. The most interesting part of this number was how each player gradually restored order, until eventually Mingus’s famous number Pork Pie Hat emerged in smiling clarity. At the opposite pole was Moran’s solo number, which was a play on shifting rhythms with an amusingly deranged quality. It had something of the mechanised fury of those pieces for mechanical player-piano by Conlon Nancarrow, but with a touch of pathos here and there, as if to acknowledge that mere human fingers can’t compete with the machine.
As for McBride’s solo spots, they accrued the rich patina of Baroque-style figuration that you’d expect from a small nimble instrument like the flute. And in Wayne Shorter’s Miyako, he gave the arching melody a lovely intimate lyricism, while Moran’s questing gentle fingers seemed to urge the harmony outwards, but with a constant return to the origin, like an expanding spiral.
However tranced or hectic the mood might be, the vein of playful wit that was the tap-root of these players’ art was always there. One number had an intriguing Satie-esque wide-eyed quality, with an undercurrent of anxiety, but that didn’t stop McBride from shrewdly anticipating a harmonic turn in the piano with an amusingly emphatic thwack. ”Man, he’s magic!” laughed Moran. We all laughed in agreement – but the real magic was the interplay between them. IH
Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 ★★★★☆
The return of the Philharmonia’s Music of Today series, a 45-minute early-evening taster of contemporary music before the main concert, is a small sign that normality is returning to concert life. Yet another is the Philharmonia’s recognition that Brexit and pandemic difficulties notwithstanding, importing a star soloist from overseas is a sure-fire way to liven up an evening.
The Philharmonia can now boast its own foreign-born star, the new Finnish Principal Conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali. On this occasion he shared the limelight with his compatriot, the violinist Pekka Kuusisto. He played one piece and conducted another in the Music of Today chamber concert, alongside a handful of strings, piano and flute. I wish I could say the pieces rose to the majesty of their theme, which was the wonders of the natural world. But Gabriella Smith’s Anthozoa just seemed a piece of vapid percussive modishness, tricked out by a sugar-coating of “modern” percussion and string sounds. The fact that these sounds were accurate portrayals of the sounds of shrimps popping and parrotfish nibbling on coral reefs didn’t improve things one bit. Then came “there is no one, not even the wind” by John Luther Adams. He is one of the few composers who can evoke the awe-inspiring, alien majesty of extreme desert and ice landscapes, but this new piece was disappointingly facile.
The later concert from the full orchestra was on a different plane of seriousness. Kuusisto was on hand again, this time to play a new violin concerto by Bryce Dessner co-commissioned by the Philharmonia, and here his talent for infusing a basically lean tone with a strange almost otherworldly intensity at last found a worthy vehicle. At first Dessner’s concerto seemed as if it might be just another large slice of American minimalism. Kuusisto hammered away at hectic repeated notes with a heroic fortitude, while the orchestra flung down off-beat chords in a vain attempt to deflect him.
But as the piece unfolded its apparently dour relentlessness was leavened by gleams of harmonic radiance, while those unstoppable motoric rhythms softened to allow plaintive, almost-lyrical ideas to come centre-stage. But they never quite vanished, instead lurking at the music’s fringes as an undercurrent of anxiety. So often the minimalist idiom tends towards a spaced-out grooviness, or else a massive triumphalism. In this piece Dessner showed it can actually be a vehicle for formal and emotional subtlety.
In the other two pieces it was Rouvali's chance to shine. He is magnificently unselfconscious, loping on stage with the large strides of a ballet dancer, giving us a quick smile before spinning round and launching the music with an imperious gesture before anyone is quite ready for it, as if to keep us all on our toes. The result in Nights of Enchantment, the final movement of an evocation of the long-vanished Mayan culture by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas was a performance full of glossy allure, in which savagery took on a disturbingly seductive edge.
The same could be said of the closing performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Conductors often revel in certain moments such as the gorgeously impressionistic beginning of Part 2, or the heavy tread of the Spring Rounds. Rouvali wanted none of that. In his performance, it was the enjoyably pitiless progression to the cruel ending that held us in its grip. IH
Mark Simpson and Diotima Quartet, King's Place ★★★★★
A brand-new piece from the world’s most celebrated living composer Thomas Adès, plus the prodigious clarinetist/composer Mark Simpson who won two BBC Young Musician of the year competitions, plus the wonderful Paris-based Diotima string quartet. There was no doubt that this concert was the hottest ticket of the classical season so far, and King’s Place was packed with the great and the good of the musical world to witness it.
Glancing at the programme note, it seemed Adès’s new quintet for clarinet and string quartet Alchymia would be a throwback to his early days when the mournful, stately gravity and mysterious harmonies of Elizabethan music were an inspiration. That era was also the high-point of alchemy in England, and Adès’s piece played with the idea of London as an “alchemical” city. Each of its four movements took something simple and transmuted it into something rich and strange, just as the alchemists did with their “base matter”.
All very Adès, and there were indeed things about this new piece that seemed familiar. There were the exquisitely gentle, sad descents of the first movement, inspired by the King’s eyes in the Tempest that become pearls under water. There were the enormously slow, simple harmonies of Lachrymae (Tears), based on John Dowland’s famous lute-song, which accreted rhythmic complications, knobbly and sharp-edged as barnacles.
But there were also things that suggested Adès has opened a door onto a new phase. So often in his music a piece that begins in lightness turns in on itself and becomes darkly obsessive. That could have been the fate of the fast second movement, inspired by the popular Elizabethan song The Woods so Wild. But the whirling glistening patterns, played with truly staggering, light-fingered virtuosity by Simpson and the quartet, stayed radiantly aloft.
The boldest movement was the last. Based on the “barrel-organ” melody of the final scene of Berg’s opera Lulu where Lulu is killed by Jack the Ripper, the piece took the melody by the hand and led it gently through different keys, dressing it in different musical clothes in a spirit of ironic playfulness. At the end, the music subsided gently to a teasing almost-close. There was an appealing modesty about the piece, and if it weren’t for the nervous intensity Adès demanded for every note (and which the performers duly gave) you could almost think he was coming close to Papa Haydn.
In the biggest piece of the evening, Brahms’s late, great clarinet quintet, the performers had to find a new tone, sensitive to the long-breathed lines and rich melancholy of Brahms’s autumnal melodies - a feat of stylistic virtuosity they achieved magnificently.
As if that weren’t enough, the Diotima Quartet launched the concert with a rarely-heard early string quartet by Franz Schubert. It had numerous original touches, such as the enigmatic Adès-like rising melody in the slow movement, which the players guided our ears towards but without labouring the point. It was an unexpected highlight in an evening packed with musical nourishment. IH
