Concert Review: Prom 49. Haitink Reveals Brahms' Softer Side

Prom 49: 20/08/11, Emmanuel Ax and The Chamber Orchestra of Europe
 

Published on Bachtrack

In many senses, Brahms is a 'marmite' composer. He is rarely met with indifference. Whilst some glorify the power and force of his orchestral writing, others shy away from this Germanic 'heaviness'; whilst some idolize his ability to weave passages and themes through one another to culminate in fierce climaxes, others condemn a fragmented and 'academic' style of writing

Beginning his conducting career in 1958, Bernard Haitink has witnessed attitudes and approaches to Brahms change, evolve and contest each other over the latter part of the 20th century. For the 49th Prom of this summer's season – with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the piano virtuoso Emanuel Ax – Haitnik brought his mature perspective and fresh energy to the stage to conduct Brahms' Second Piano Concerto and Fourth and final Symphony.

Brahms's 2nd Piano Concerto was completed 22 years after its antecedent, whilst the composer was living in Pressbaum, near Vienna. In contrast to the 1st Piano Concerto, the work was met with warm approval, which became widespread as the composer brought the work to many European cities. Over 100 years later it is still a firm favourite in the canon, and a cornerstone work for pianists wishing to add Brahms to their repertoire. Under Haitink's baton, the work was exquisitely wrought. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe was extremely responsive to the subtle architecture he demanded from each phrase; the smaller ensemble more permissive to his tender, delicate tailoring.

Emanuel Ax describes the 2nd Piano Concerto as a 'work he learned many years ago and has tried to get right ever since.' He brought a firm yet vivacious tone to the sanguine first movement, keeping the opening chordal passages bright, revealing a slightly darker energy for the later parts of the movement that veer towards an ominous state of tension. Melodic passages were given a full, expressive legato, whereas transitional passages were neat and trim, moving the music forward. Haitink did not pull the tempo around as much as is now customary, although sometimes clipped faster passages to give a greater bite. The haunting second movement, with juxtaposition of permissiveness and impetuous zeal, was also slightly reserved. The third movement revealed the strengths of the chamber ensemble, where the slightly grittier string textures one finds within a smaller ensemble gave a rarely heard edge, and the beautiful cello solo shone through the other part writing with a distinct elegance. The fourth movement was more satisfying in relation to what had come before, pulling the strands of melodic fabric together in a heady climax.

However, despite the success of the finesse with which the work was performed, there was a distinct feeling of reservation which worked against the expressive potential of the music. It was apparent that the concentration was on the polished surface of each phrase, rather than on its emotional kernel. The work never forgot itself or properly let go even in the the finale and therefore never reached the point where it transcended itself, or surrendered to our modern conception of 'true' romantic passion.
The 4th symphony, was distinctly more satisfying. Completed in short proximity to his 3rd, the two are often treated as a complementary pair, although it is the 4th that is considered the more musically ingenious. On completion, many found the taut structure of this intricate tapestry of motifs difficult to accept, although the material still asserts a sense of spontaneity and profound emotional depth.

The luscious harmonies and melodic surfaces that comprise the first two movements of the Symphony were undoubtedly more suited to Haitink's conducting style. But also, there was less of a sense of the 'tightness' that had dominated the first performance, and the orchestra seemed more at ease; caught in the motions of Brahms's writing. The third movement was light and crisp, with something of a buoyant, fresh, 'Britishness' about it. Phrases were lifted, spun out, then lingered ever so slightly before returning back to their starting point. The fourth movement convincingly fulfilled the previous movements; it felt fresh and organic, yet Haitink's foot was still touching the brake slightly; the climactic melodies from the string section were unified by a sense of strength rather than fervour.

Although more expressive than the second piano concerto, there was no sense of the passionate abandon that most Brahms lovers seek from his work. In this sense, the concert posed a pressing question with regards to the role of lighter, more historically appropriate interpretations of romantic composers. Although there is undoubtedly a value and historical interest as to the conditions and cultural environment that Brahms would have written under, as a performance to a modern audience who have been shaped by the cultural conditions of the 20th century, what can this now reserved interpretation give? For those of us who have learned to appreciate the gargantuan scale of modern orchestral composition, a truly romantic rendering of any composition is no longer going to evoke the listener in the same manner. However, for a precisely-tailored and accurate portrayal of the composer, that may help cross the marmite divide and lend appeal to Brahms' softer side, Bernard Haitnik's rendition was incomparable.

Concert Review: Die Fledermaus

Die Fledermaus 
West Road Concert Hall, Thursday 23rd February – Saturday 25th February, £10/£16

Last night the curtain opened to the operatic event of the year: Cambridge University Opera Society’s production of Die Fledermaus. Composed by Johann Strauss II in 1894, this light operetta takes its audience for a whirling waltz through Viennese aristocratic culture in a glitzy three-act tribute to the ballroom and its accompanying pleasures.

CUOS’s modern day equivalent was set in London, where the cast formed a Made in Chelsea-style network of wealthy twenty-somethings, ugg boots and all. The production used Alistair Beaton’s English translation, giving the audience a break from faffing with the libretto.

It was a five star performance from each member of the cast. Each actor made their character their own, and balanced slapstick humour and tomfoolery with a sense of earnestness and genuine appeal to human nature. Sam Oladeinde was an endearing and exuberant protagonist as Gabriel Von Eisenstein; Margaret Walker made a sultry yet steely Rosalinde – a part which is hard to give life to in the modern interpretation. Grace Durham’s trouser role, the Russian host Prince Orlovsky, was vivacious and accurate down to the last mannerism. Falke (Nick Mogg), Chief Inspector Frank (Iwan Davies), and Dr Blind (Henry Neill) were strong in their supporting roles. James Swanton took the caricature to new heights in his speaking part as the old jailer Frosch, and Peter Aisher played the thoroughbred Italian lover Alfredo with a perfect accent and bodily gestures.

Certain cast members stood out for their superb technical ability and musicality; Margaret Walker exhibited outstanding stamina and control, and Aisher’s tenor voice was outstandingly rich and resonant for someone of his age. The star of the show, however, had to be Kristi Bryson for her portrayal of the maid Adele. Byrson showed an outstanding level of vocal agility, and oozed an effortless yet vibrant theatricality in her role’s transformation from cockney sweetheart – “Buskers! Oi, you, bugger off and find a job!” – to an elegant charlatan actress.

The orchestra started off rather sluggish during the overture, but warmed up through the performance to deliver the crisp light steps and the lilting melody lines of the Waltz as we love and know them. The choreographed parts worked well, making a nice visual interlude and giving the chorus a chance to be more animated rather than static in the background. Musical director Alex Beetschen’s conducting was articulate and buoyant throughout the performance, although it was a little bit too school boy-clean. A deeper rendition would have loosened the reigns on the tempi and dynamic a little to air the darker, sharper crags that lay under the thin veneer of the Vienese high-life.

The disappointing element was definitely the set. The bridal staircase in the second act was unimaginative but at least pleasing to the eye; the final act attempted to be morbid but was uninspiring. The boudoir set of the first act, however, looked completely and utterly amateur: like a spare room decked out with Next items, circa 2003. There was no visual cohesion between any of the scenes, and the costumes were none too impressive. It seemed a bit of a let down considering other elements of the production, including the posters and programme notes had been so professional.

All in all, though, the audience loved it. And why shouldn’t they? This was Johann Strauss II exactly as he should be: dry, light, fine and sparkling. I’ll drink to that.

Festival Review: Tête à Tête & Grimeborn Opera Festivals

Article reviewing the opera festivals Tête à Tête and Grimeborn for Classical Music Magazine, Oct 2011
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What direction is contemporary opera moving in? According to 2011's new-opera festivals: every direction possible.

This summer, East and West London went head-to-head, fighting to bring opera into a new array of styles and subjects. Hammersmith's Tête à Tête festival earned it's boast as the ‘most imaginative laboratory for new opera’, presenting a diverse patchwork of finished productions alongside works in progress. Meanwhile, the 5th Grimeborn Festival ran in East London's gritty Dalston; a series of innovative operas and musical theatre pieces staged in the squat-chic Arcola Theatre.

Both festivals blurred the boundaries of traditional styles, forming operatic hybrids from movement-theatre, street entertainment, live electronics and performance-art. Themes ranged from traditional subjects (Greek mythology and Austen novels) to today's politics (ecological and middle-eastern issues) to the macabre and downright bizarre (drunk artists, sexualised nursery rhymes and the story of Ziggy, a cabaret-singing aborted foetus). Here is an overview of the works likely to remain with us for longer than one season:

Grimeborn launched with the London premiere of Jonathan Dove's new take on the Austen classic, Mansfield Park. 'When I first read Mansfield Park, over twenty years ago, I heard music' Dove claims; the appeal being to give expression to the quiet sufferings of the heroine, Fanny Price. The libretto, by Alasdair Middleton, distills Austen's story, making the Cinderella aspect its kernel. Herritage Opera commissioned the work, to add to their repertoire of chamber operas they perform at stately homes around England, using only a piano for accompaniment – an appropriate medium to set a 19th Century classic. Musically, Dove wanted to write something which was not bound by the stylistic procedures of the period, but would be recognisable and appropriate to the era. The result is an attractive and engaging work, which is reserved yet not lifeless; which manages to capture the charm of the period without becoming too chocolate-boxy. Dove's melodies for his characters are memorable, although at times the work could have benefited from more changes of key and harmony to move the action forward and prevent a feeling of stasis.

The 'traditional with a twist' idea was echoed elsewhere in the festival; Barefoot Opera reinvented Handel's Alcina for the Grimeborn, presenting it as a stripped-down version which kept the original melodies of the arias but accompanied them with just a clarinet and a harpsichord, adding an english narrator, folk interludes and pieces of movement theatre.

Other librettists, meanwhile, ventured into uncharted areas. With subject matter influenced by the recent successes of quirky opera-biogs, such as Anna Nicole, Steven Crowe's The Francis Bacon Opera, presents a humorous yet intelligent look at the life of the 20th Century's most revered painter. Staged inside a irregularly-shaped yellow scaffold – a motif featured in many of Bacon's paintings – the work uses an exact transcription from the 1985 Melvyn Bragg interview, which won awards for it's brutal honesty and controversial subject matter. Musically, we can see the attraction of Bacon and Bragg to the composer; Bacon's philosophical spiels about art and beauty were stretched into long luxurious melody lines, whilst the intonation of Bragg's questioning grew ever more ridiculous and high-pitched as he steadily grew more drunk.

The decadent and the absurd provided a recurrent theme, particularly for Tête à Tête, where the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme protégés Luke Styles and Peter Cant premiered the first scene of their unfinished work A Fetus in America, which breaks stylistic boundaries, bringing together drag, musical satire and cabaret to critique pro-life issues and American politics.

However, the most innovative material of the festivals – two Tête à Tête works that are clearly holding the torch for the future of new opera – were SizeZero Opera's The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane and Frances M Lynch's collaboration with Alejandro Viñao: Baghdad Monologue.
The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane was a short but truly outstanding work by Singaporean composer Diana Soh, which told a story of Jack and Jill in sexual pursuit of one another through a cut-and-paste libretto made entirely from snippets of nursery rhymes (James Currie). Dressed in a baby-doll dress the lead soprano and founder of the company, Laura Bowler, hurled herself through a series of schizophrenic ramblings, lending a sexual element to the originally innocent text. The score's rhythms were neat and articulate, its pace was fast and its material was fresh. However, its real innovation lay in the way that it combined different tonalities – simple, childlike, melodies in a major key against dissonant chords and obscure timbres – to achieve the effect of distorted innocence.

Baghdad Monologue was a work for a solo performer and live electronics which commented on the middle-eastern intervention, inspired by Eliot Weinberger's book What I Heard About Iraq. It was constructed from small soundbites, some abstract noise, others obvious references to everyday life: the call to prayer, George Bush's voice; the innocent sound of children playing. These were blended into Lynch's voice, used to punctuate it; they faded in, out, were sometimes distorted or bled into one another to create an exquisite patchwork of politically-charged aural meanings.

What united both works in their success was music's central and irreplaceable role. Whereas with Dove's Mansfield Park, or Crowe's Francis Bacon the music adds to the libretto, these works are entirely reliant on their medium in order to even make sense. The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane depends on it's music for its sense of befouled innocence; Baghdad Monologue depends music to refer to different cultures. If we want to see contemporary opera continue to flourish, then undoubtedly, this 'gestalt' approach is its foremost champion.

Concert Review: SOUNDFEST, Atherton & Atherton, HKPO, 07/01/11 (Stravinsky, Britten, Tchaikovsky)

 SOUNDFEST, Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Friday 7th January 2011, David Atherton conducting Elizabeth Atherton (soprano) with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra
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My initial desire as a concert-goer was for more sense of presence in the opening number of tonight's concert, Stravinksy's Symphonies of Wind Instruments. The hopping reed passages, recurrent in this initial number, could have defined the edges of the patchwork mood sequence through a sharper form of attack (required since, unfortunately, the HKPO was playing to a half-empty concert hall). Correspondingly, the finest sections were the slow chordal passages, which fanned out, beautifully, through stepwise lines with a solemn tone and sense of reservation. One could not help feeling that perhaps the performers were responding to this diminished sense of performance space.

Following on the heels of the Symphonies, however, Elizabeth Atherton sailed through a masterful rendition of Britten's Les Illuminations with a sense of confidence which placed her firmly at the helm of the programme's first half; each role she portrayed within the song cycle was entirely believable. Completely metamorphosing from animated narrator to serene bystander, she propelled and retracted the narrative seemingly at whim, catching the entire audience under the spell of her tongue and taking off with their emotions. Technically, each swoop and glide was faultlessly placed; each word perfectly matched by a subtle timbral facet.

The Nutcracker was the final item on the programme, and, as expected, David Atherton's show-stopper. From under the deft strokes of his baton, the HKPO unfurled each familiar melody with luscious romantic swells and securely tailored falls. Elements within Atherton's interpretation were both surprising and appealing: melodic lines were often portioned into shorter phrases, which kept the work light in relation to unusually heavy rhythmic drive he had given to the piece. With his shoulders slightly stiff, almost in the pose of a bear, Atherton even stepped into a waltz in more than one of the dance movements with surprising agility. Effectively, Atherton saved a fuller, weightier, sense of melodic line until the end to carry the glorious, sweeping final movement; a satisfying finale to a well-delivered programme.

Concert Review: Children's Prom

Concert Review: BBC Proms, Prom 59, Royal Albert Hall, Monday 30th August, 11.00 am-12.30 pm, Aurora Orchestra, National Children's Chamber Orchestra, National Youth Chamber Orchestra, Nicholas Collon.
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'Crikey, they are making a lot of noise backstage!' Basil Brush remarked as he popped up from a fox hole in the corner of the RAH stage. Whether the orchestra was in fact louder than Basil himself - who delivered an uninhibited commentary to the children's prom, the 59th concert in the 2010 Proms season - is debatable. Accompanied by the gentler-worded Louise Fryer and conducted by the amicable Nicholas Collon, Basil 'boomed' his way through a carefully crafted and varied programme, which included break dancing to Prokofiev, Capoiera to Lully, 'safe' show-stoppers such as Rimsky-Korsakoff's The Flight of the Bumble Bee, alongside more adventurous programming such as the 2nd Movement from Schostakovitch's 10th.

As an adult going with a child, I appreciated the programme, which achieved a balance in being educational as well as entertaining; enlivening works through visual accompaniments and unusual orchestration rather than tacky sensationalism (would I expect anything other from BBC Radio 3?) The required amount of audience participation was tasteful, keeping children engaged by making them clap and stomp in time with the orchestra, yet not going as far as to make the adults feel stupid.
I enjoyed myself, but how did my 9 year old piano pupil feel? Her description of the experience as a whole on leaving the hall, was that it was 'fantastic'; when quizzed further she disclosed that the elements of dance in the programme had been her favourite. On reflection, I consider this an interesting point. Obviously, for a child, the attraction of dance provides a richer experience than the music alone; it enables the child to see the music in direct relationship to gesture and emotional narrative. What I would have liked to have seen done is movement utilized in such a way as to highlight sonic relationships, providing a visual structure to help the children hear the music differently. A point in the programme which would have benefited from this was the penultimate work, Chis Willis's composition Mashup, an interesting orchestral arrangement of all the music heard through the concert. A lovely idea, I thought, but how many children, after hearing the works just once, would be able to identify motific fragments as they were played on top of one another in complex contrapuntal arrangements? Unfortunately I fear that the point was lost; perhaps corresponding visual cues would have been one way in which this clever design may have been communicated to the young audience.

However, I do not make this point to undersell the morning's success. My pupil came from the concert feeling inspired, which is obviously what concerts of this nature strive to achieve. As we discussed afterwards, a large amount of this to do with the fact she had noticed the ages of the young performer's in the Aurora Orchestra and the National Youth/Children's Chamber Orchestras, who delivered the programme with mature expression and virulent sense of drama. I was worried that intimidation may have had the opposite effect, but no, the resulting logic from the experience was a firm 'if they can do it, so can I', which is wonderful. Therefore, in relation to the points made above, and on the basis that the experience may encourage at least two days of diligent practice my verdict has to be: excellent, 5 stars.