Back Reviewing Concerts: Nicholas McGegan Conducts the Bournemouth Symphony

Conductor Nicholas McGegan (Photo: Steve J Sherman)

I haven’t reviewed a concert in quite a while, so it was good to get back in the business, thanks to Bachtrack. Conductor Nicholas McGegan and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra certainly brought sensitivity and vitality to a collection of pieces by Shcubert, Mozart and Beethoven:

"At the other end of the programme, a rather more serious proposition in four movements: Schubert’s reasonably early but oh-so-mature Fifth Symphony. A product of Schubert’s 19th year, the Fifth demonstrates the charms of a composer who never seems to have suffered the stylistic growing pains of a man struggling for a mature voice. It was here that McGegan drew the best from the BSO, letting the music flow, bringing it to life by making the most of dynamic contrasts and pointed accents. He saw no need to tug at the tempi, and the orchestra responded with playing of considerable subtlety, a case in point being the hushed but nuanced sound of the strings giving space to the conversations of wind instruments as the first movement slipped from exposition to development."

Read the whole thing at Bachtrack.

Chesterfield on Classical: Wagner's Clap

Devil’s Trill is delighted to post this guest blog by the veteran record producer and music critic Roger Chesterfield.

I sometimes wonder, what with Radio 3’s baffling disregard for the finer details of elite record collecting, who will sweat the small stuff when I’ve taken my stalls seat in the great concert hall in the sky. Reassurance is at hand in the form of the latest volume of Philip Philpott’s magisterial Matrix Numbers of the Lesser Known German Labels of the 1940s, which has, over the last few months, been a light at the end of the tunnel of interminable wet-weather walks with the dog. With bedraggled lab on the rug and my own fireside seat secured, a glass of Highland Park in my hand and the new MNLKGL40 (as it’s affectionately known) in my lap, the hours waltz by, the chimes of midnight barely registered among the close-typed dashes and digits lining some 1600 pages.

Perusing those lines dedicated to the much missed Bavarian imprint Schnappstein-Gimellphon, I happened upon the matrix numbers for the original release of Herrman Schnipelbrumpf’s 1947 hecklephone recital with pianist Wim Vomm, apparently much prized by hecklephiles. When released, Schnipelbrumpf’s recital covered some fourteen sides on 78rpm shellac record including – and here’s where it gets really fun – three sides given over entirely to applause. This is all the more curious given that the recital was entirely studio-recorded in Schnappstein-Gimellphon’s bespoke property, located deep in the mountains and powered entirely by hot air donated by patrons at the Salzburg Festival.

All this stirred some misremembered something deep within the Chesterfield brainvaults and I recalled a long discarded custom which was, at one time, encountered at Bayreuth in odd-numbered years, of giving a single clap some way into the second act of Dutchman, in tribute to a similar gesture once given by Wagner in 1880. Some wags carped that Wagner had simply been squashing a recalcitrant fly, but such was the strictness of observance of the custom among some Wagnerites that Deutsche Grammophon’s then-director, Ludwig Donkwurt, insisted the clap be included in Karl Bohm’s 1971 yellow-label traversal. Apparently, Gregory Peck was flown in from New York to do the honours and got it down in one take.

And then, with his customary lightness of touch, Philpott joined the dots which had been just out of focus to the poor old Chesterfield varifocals. It turns out that Donkwurt began his career at Schnappstein-Gimellphon (of course) and had adopted the practice of including applause at unusual moments in a variety of music. His belief in the “Wagner Clap” had resulted in a string of scholarly discoveries, including the revelation that Beethoven had insisted on applause after the exposition of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. Once at DG, Donkwurt had a special recorded-applause unit established and one Carlos Kleiber was so taken with the idea that he led nineteen rehearsals with the ensemble, before abandoning the project and declaring their clapping “too provincial”.

Happy to resist the many entreaties to “tweet” my thoughts to the Third Programme, I communicated all of this to the director of Radio 3 via e-mail, though it is with some dismay that I report the station’s most recent relay of the Kleiber 5^th was accompanied by nothing of this remarkable scholarship. No doubt the Beeb’s subscription to MNLKGL40 lapsed long ago, and those fresh discoveries nestled amongst the matrix numbers will have to remain between the dog, the Highland Park, and myself.

Bychkov and OAE impress with Schubert in Basingstoke

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Bychkov

The Anvil, Basingstoke

5 April 2014

Semyon Bychkov

When Ludwig van Beethoven died, in 1827, 20,000 people lined the streets of Vienna to watch his funeral procession pass. Among them was the 30 year old Franz Schubert, an ardent admirer of his older colleague, but when he himself passed away, a year later, his death was little marked beyond his own circle of friends and family.  Beethoven’s fame was immediate and unprecedented; Schubert’s reputation grew slowly over many decades, thanks in part to the rediscovery of his epic final symphony, subtitled the ‘Great’, which the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and eminent Russian conductor Semyon Bychkov placed alongside Beethoven’s Seventh for this Anvil performance.

The vast scale and difficulty of Schubert’s ‘Great’ Symphony (sometimes dubiously known as the Ninth) baffled those who saw the score in the first years after it was composed. Today, however, it’s now a central part of the repertoire and the OAE proved how totally modern orchestras are able to manage its hour-long duration. Bychkov chose his tempos carefully, making sure to sustain the piece’s remarkable, unbroken momentum, and the orchestra responded with beautifully refined and tireless playing that balanced their customary concern for historically-informed performance with richness of sound not always associated with period-instrument ensembles. So many of Schubert’s late masterpieces speak to us with a profound expressive power that seems barely believable from such a young man, and this symphony is no expectation – this is never truer than in the infinitely touching central section of the third movement, rendered with melting tenderness by orchestra and conductor.

Bychkov’s steadiness and certainty – such virtues in the Schubert – proved less well suited to Beethoven’s feisty Seventh Symphony, dubbed “the apotheosis of the dance” by Richard Wagner. Much of this music revolves obsessively around dance-infused rhythms and motifs, needing an excitable performance to truly bring it to life. Perhaps Bychkov hoped to retreat from the crazed power that can inhabit this piece and invest it with greater nobility, but in putting off the energetic vigour until the finale he missed the riotous unpredictability that courses through this music. He wanted for nothing from the orchestra, but the impression was of an approach better suited to one composer than the other. 

This review originally appeared in the Basingstoke Gazette.

Review: The Czech Philharmonic on tour

Freddy Kempf (photo: Neda Navaee)

Czech Philharmonic Orchestra

16 April 2013 – The Anvil, Basingstoke

It doesn’t get much more authentic than this: Czech music, exquisitely performed by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and the Czech Republic’s finest conductor, Jiří Bělohlávek. They brought to The Anvil dances and tone-poems by Antonin Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana, two great composers adept at capturing the spirit of their homeland in music. Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances show all his skill in writing for the orchestra, reaching out to folk tradition while remaining models of classical form. In them, he discovers radiant musical colours with his combinations of instruments and the Czech players brought them to life with astonishing commitment and delicacy. Bělohlávek chose the lively ninth and fifteenth Dances to top-and-tail the selection, sandwiching between them the gorgeous tenth Dance, sculpted with expressive finesse that suggested regret and resignation.

 

Dvořák’s uncomplicated miniatures might have seemed inconsequential next to the mighty, high-minded canvas of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto (the Emperor), but pianist Freddy Kempf (winner of the 1992 BBC Young Musician of the Year competition) was in the mood to extend the fun. His performance was exuberant and emphatic - a young man’s view of a piece that contains some of Beethoven’s most joyful and excitable music. If you didn’t know before-hand, you wouldn’t guess that the Concerto was composed in a war zone, but Beethoven risked death by staying at his desk to compose it while Napoleon’s troops fought around his Viennese home. If Kempf’s performance missed some of the tenderness and solemnity that can be found in the Concerto’s long first movement, he made up for it with his inexhaustible spontaneity, heard to best effect in the touching slow movement and beautifully supported by the orchestra. He rewarded the audience’s enthusiastic applause with more Beethoven (“if you insist”, he quipped): the slow movement of the Pathétique Piano Sonata, played with admirable simplicity.

 

The night really belonged to the Czechs, though, who concluded with three pieces from Smetana’s masterpiece, Ma Vlast (My Country). With Vltava, which celebrates the mighty Czech river, the orchestra’s string players plumbed the water’s depths and shimmering shallows. Quivering clarinet playing added tenderness to the dramatic tale of Šárka and the orchestra painted vivid pictures of the landscape in From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields. These players really hang on Bělohlávek’s every gesture, producing subtle nuances of phrasing that can only happen when every musician plays and breathes as one. A little more Smetana – The Dance of the Comedians from the opera The Bartered Bride – capped a brilliant concert. It really doesn’t get much better than this.

 

This review was written for the Basingstoke Gazette.

Arabella Steinbacher's Beethoven

Conductor Kurt Sanderling's career was celebrated by the Philharmonia on Thursday, in a concert that included German violinist Arabella Steinbacher performing Beethoven's Violin Concerto:

"German violinist Arabella Steinbacher stripped away some of the deadening portentousness that can dog performances of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and injected lightness of being and teasing charm. Her way with it was contended and sunny and her performance captivated more than her relatively small and occasionally constricted tone suggested it might. Ideally, the long first movement calls for a greater deepening of insight and involvement as it progresses than Steinbacher provided, but her carefree way with the improvisatory solo part of the Larghetto, robust vigour in the concluding Rondo and dazzling command of Kreisler’s cadenzas sealed an effective and very enjoyable interpretation."

You can read my full review at Classical Source.

Things to do in Vienna when you're dead

I couldn't visit Vienna without making the pilgrimage to see Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert in their final resting places. Luckily, the Zentralfriedhof is on the line out to the airport, making a visit to Vienna's central cemetery very easy. You've got to have the legs for it, though: the cemetery covers a slightly larger area than the city centre and, if you walk from one side to the other, like I did with my suitcase, you'll get a good workout to boot. Luckily for you, I took some snaps of the composers I found.

Mozart's memorial. Mozart is actually buried up the road, near a big motorway junction. Yes, we do know where he is buried, though the precise plot isn't known.

Beethoven, sitting just behind the Mozart memorial and next to Schubert. The two were exhumed from their original graves and reburied here in the late nineteenth century. Apparently, Bruckner had to be dragged away from their corpses. Nice.

 

Schubert, to the right of Beethoven's grave.

Brahms, looking a bit worried, as you'd expect.

Hugo Wolf, looking a little like he'd expected there to be the body of a muscle man painted below the hole for his head.

An appropriately modernist grave for Arnold Schoenberg.

Zemlinsky, with the shiniest grave in the cemetery.

Devil's Trill in Vienna

Musikverein and Karlskirche, Vienna

Vienna sits in the centre of Europe – much further east than you’d think – just a few dozen miles from Slovakia and Hungary, in that patch of Austria untroubled by Alpine peaks.  For a century and a half it was Europe’s musical heart, lying on the easy path round the mountains between the northern capitals of old Europe and Italy.  It was where composers came to make it big: Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler; all pulled here by the promise of exposure and fame.  It still clings to those names, immortalising them in statues and museums, though their ubiquity suggests that subsequent revolutionaries moved on long ago.  

Vienna itself has avoided the sprawl of many of its European neighbours: ten minutes on the train out of the city centre and you’re surrounded by farms.  Its nineteenth century architects must have expected it to keep-a-pace with the Londons and Berlins of this world, designing vast boulevards and public spaces that these days often seem eerily empty.  If the city seems small scale, though, it has still seen its share of history, making London feel like a paragon of continuity in comparison.  Signs of Nazi control have gone, but the Soviets left their mark, not least at Schwartzenbergplatz, where the Soviet War Memorial stands as a strident monument to their expansion west. 

Soviet War Memorial, Vienna

Now, with all that history under the bridge, Vienna is left with its culture, simultaneously pedalled as high art and low kitsch.  You can take your pick: hear Mozart at the Musikverein, or munch his chocolate balls at the airport.  But in Vienna, the division isn’t always as clear: its highest of cultural institutions, the Vienna Philharmonic, are as famous for sleep-waltzing through new year’s morning fluff as for carrying the torch for Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.

My short visit coincided with some unseasonally strong sunshine, throwing the most flattering of light on the baroque Karlskirche and the ornate Secession building.  Even the Soviet monolith glowed brilliantly as the sun set.  My real interest lay, though, in a less gilded structure.  The Musikverein, counted so often as one of the world’s great spaces for music, is dusty red and from the outside looks barely large enough to house a concert hall.  The reason becomes obvious: the main hall is surprisingly small, an impression only strengthened by the gloomy golden decor and low-flying chandeliers.  It certainly looks bigger on TV.

Musikverein, Vienna

Inside, though, it’s hard not to get excited.  Never mind the new year’s nonsense; on this stage, Bruno Walter conducted his legendary 1938 performance of Mahler’s 9^th, just weeks before the Anschluss; half a century later, it was here that Carlos Kleiber conducted his miraculous Brahms 2.  The stage, though, is compact and is a squeeze for a modern orchestra.  While I was in Vienna, I heard two concerts by the visiting City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with the music director Andris Nelsons  which tested the limits of the hall and its little stage.       

Britten’s Four Sea interludes (without the Passacaglia, inserted into the set in the orchestra’s Birmingham warm up) seemed at times to be too much for the hall.  At its loudest, its screeching fury begged for a bigger space.  It certainly wasn’t the orchestra’s fault – they could hardly have played it all mezzo forte – but I had to wonder what impression it had left on a Viennese audience, hardly likely to be too familiar with Britten’s music.

Rudolf Buchbinder’s performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto made a much better case for the Musikverein’s acoustics.  This is the sort of music its architects might have imagined would have been played here, and the hall responded by bathing the performance in a richly resonant aura.  It has it pitfalls, though: for all its luxuriant reverb, the acoustic has the sense of closeness common to smaller halls.  On the stage of the Musikverein, your sound might be silken, but the audience will hear if you make a mistake.  So it was that Buchbinder’s occasional untidiness was clear to hear, but his performance, which seemed to stir and awaken as it unfolded, was so fresh and free that it barely mattered.  He had excellent support from the CBSO, too: the bridge from the bullied solemnity of the slow movement to the whispered excitement of the finale, for example, could not have been bettered.

It got even better after the interval.  Andris Nelsons’s way with Sibelius’s Second Symphony was riveting.  The first movement became a fizzing prelude to the joyous finale, but the tone poem-like second movement plumbed the depths with craggy fanfares and tense silences.  It really was gripping and somehow the small hall only made it more intense.  The orchestra sounded better than I have ever heard them (and they’re usually no slouches); on a level here with any orchestra in the world.  If they don’t already plan to, Nelsons and the CBSO should get this one down on disc. 

Jonas Kaufmann and the CBSO, Vienna

It was Jonas Kaufmann’s turn as soloist the following night, and his considerable fame filled most of the few empty seats seen the previous evening.  His appearance a few weeks earlier in Birmingham was heavily covered in the British press, and I had a few words to say about it at the time.  His performance was very similar in Vienna; the Musikverein, though, didn’t seem as kind to his voice as Birmingham’s much larger Symphony Hall.  It seemed, also, that the 1700 strong Viennese audience had a tougher time sitting quietly than their Birmingham counterparts: the end of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder was rather ruined by the coughing and fidgeting that smothered what should have been a rapt silence.  The selection of Strauss songs again proved to be the high point; Kauf-watchers will be interested to know that he dropped the folded arms adopted for Morgen! in Birmingham for a more pious clasped-hands position.

Debussy’s La Mer opened the concert; Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe Second Suite ended it.  It surely is the ultimate sumptuous show stopper and Nelsons lavished attention over the famous “dawn” episode.  It ached and flexed as though slowly emerging from peaceful slumber, transforming assuredly into the exhilarating revelry that ends the ballet.  Is there any music better than this?  I don’t think so.  

Beethoven round 2 from the Belceas

Thursday saw another terrific concert in the Belcea Quartet's Beethoven cycle at Wigmore Hall.  Read my review at Classicalsource.  Also, read my interview with Belcea violist Krzysztof Chorzelski from earlier this year.

Interview: Belceas take on Beethoven

Boulez isn't the only B in town.  Across at Wigmore Hall, the Belcea Quartet are beginning a year long cycle of Beethoven's string quartets, starting tonight with Op18/3, Op74 and Op130 (without Grosse Fuge).  I spoke to the quartet's violist, Krzysztof Chorzelski, for Classicalsource.com about this new project.  You can read the full interview here.  Tickets for this evenings concert are sold out, but the concert is broadcast live on Radio 3 at 7.30pm and will be available for 7 days on BBC iplayer.

Top Rite at RFH

No violin concertos, I know, but a brilliant Rite of Spring to report on.  Dutoit and the RPO produced a Rite to rival Jurowski's 2008 LPO performance in the same hall, but this was totally different.  Proof, if proof be need be, that there's no one way of playing a masterpiece.

You can read my full review at Classicalsource, but here’s an extract:

“It was to have been Martha Argerich in Schumann’s Piano Concerto; another cancellation and a change of work ensured some of the shine faded on this Royal Philharmonic Orchestra concert before it had even started. Argerich’s replacement, Nikolai Lugansky, was immaculate but dull in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto; but delight lay elsewhere, in a stunning performance of The Rite of Spring that grew inexorably in power as it progressed.”

The concert was broadcast live and can be heard (in the UK and before next Tuesday) here.

Zukerman at RFH London

There are few violinists of Pinchas Zukerman's vintage still doing the rounds; how different from the scene when he was rising to the top.  Zukerman gave us an excellent Beethoven Violin Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday, sounding like a visitor from a more warm-hearted past and if his conducting wasn't much cop, it didn't diminish the thrill of hearing him live.  Read my full concert review at Classicalsource .