WETA FM 90.9 Blog

Instead of a Bach/Wagner Easter pilgrimage, I decided to give all the important London orchestras a good listen this spring. For scheduling reasons, I caught the Philharmonia (invigorated by Esa-Pekka Salonen’s assumption of principle conductor duties) in Vienna, but the London Philharmonic Orchestra (similarly energized by Vladimir Jurowski having taken the helm) and the London Symphony Orchestra (in their second full season with Valery Gergiev, but here under Daniel Harding) offered interesting programs during my time in London. Obvious omissions are the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (Gatti) and the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Bělohlávek), but a BBC SO Wagner/Bruckner concert at the Barbican sadly didn’t fit my schedule and the RPO’s one-hour “Opus 60” concert(s), although intriguing in principle, didn’t look appealing enough when Pierre-Laurent Aimard played three Beethoven concertos with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe just south of the river.

There are too many major ‘minor’ orchestras to fit them into a good week’s worth of concert-going—St. Martin in the Fields, the English Chamber Orchestra, and the Academy of Ancient Music are all bustling for deserved attention—but at least I caught the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Heiner Goebbels’ Songs of Wars I have seen.

The succinct summary would be: Disappointment at a high level. The LSO trumpets blared as if actively oblivious to any Brucknerian spirit (and the rest of the orchestra didn’t seem to care much about Harding’s genuine efforts, either), and Lang Lang gave a vacuous performance of Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto in the same concert at the Barbican. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Aimard—playing and ‘conducting’—were audibly exhausted at the Royal Festival Hall and while the quality of the music making was high, the lack of spiritedness turned Beethoven’s Piano Concertos One through Three into amiable background music. The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain managed for capably executed excitement with enormous forces under Paul Daniels in an intelligent program of Thomas Adès, Rachmaninov, Ravel, and—best—George Benjamin, whose nine-partite “Dance Figures” was an instant hit with the enthusiastic crowd at the Southbank Centre.

Geraldine McGreevy replacing Christine Schäfer at a Wigmore Hall recital wasn’t going to be an improvement, but it could have been better than the piercing wobble masquerading as vibrato that had a tendency towards the shrill and over-accentuation. Apart from the impeccable pronunciation, there was little this recital of Shakespeare-themed Schubert really offered, and the strained, semi-operatic way of delivering art song had nothing of the naturalness that Schäfer is capable of—and was in any case unnecessary for intimate little Wigmore Hall where the singer needs little force or artifice. Replacement pianist Christopher Gould’s pianism was a tonic.

The Goebbels Songs of Wars I have seen—almost performance art with the string players of the combined orchestras reciting from the Gertrude Stein memoire “Wars I have seen” with the skill, gusto, and “studied artlessness” (James Oestreich) of professional actors—was a first highlight. The young and lithe Estonian conductor Anu Tali led the split orchestra—Men and the brutal sounds of war (timpani, brass) at the back, all women on strings up front (representing those left to the mundanities of life during war); modern instruments stage left, historic instruments (including theorbo) stage right—and the result was immediately compelling, with the music switching amiably between Matthew Locke’s “Tempest” and the electronica enriched music of Echt-Goebbels. The result was much more impressive than the repetitive orchestral excerpts from his “Surrogate Cities” that occupied the first half of this wholly entertaining evening.

The Royal Academy of Music and London Sinfonietta presenting eight post-graduate students’ compositions at a workshop themed “Sounds of the City” was an intriguing little lunch bonus that day, with brevity—that most underrated of virtues in classical music—plenty present as were genuinely fine ideas. One of the students should take all eight pieces for flute, clarinet, cello, and harp, orchestrate them with strings and timpani, add transitions in the form of a warped waltz from movement to movement, and publish the whole thing (with due credit, of course) as a CitySoundSymphony. Given the surprising homogeneity and the quality of the presented compositions, it could only do Alison Barber,
Ivor Bonnici, Laura Bowler, Richard Bullen, Elo Masing, Sebastian Rapacki, and Sam Quartermaine Smith proud.

London was done proud by the performances of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, though. Perhaps less obviously so in the program of 20^th Century eastern European music of Giya Kancheli, Benjamin Yusupov, and Valentin Silvestrov, where Kancheli’s “Another Step”, with its martial blows played out against metallic pizzicato and soothing strings—succumbing to calm and rearing its collective head again stood out as a post-Mahlerian smorgasbord of styles, while Yusuopov’s Cello Concerto with Mischa Maisky, a latter-day Gandalf of the cello, was more blatant with its “innocent soul of the cello” musically pitted against the onslaught of evil elements from the orchestra. A bit like Schnittke, but without the extremes in stylistic contrast and surprise. The Silvestrov Symphony No.5, a mix of Mahler’s 5^th and 10^th, Prokofiev’s 5^th, Tippett’s 4^th symphonies and Scriabin’s “Mysterium”, reaffirmed the genre rather than overcoming it, despite the cutesiness of its “Post Symphony” tag.

A world-class performance, finally (literally, as it was my last night in town) came at the hands of the same performers—with Jurowski conducting a cracking, tight Mahler First Symphony preceded by Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto where Martin Helmchen married Mozartean lightness to Chopin-romanticism. Even the Mahler would have been worth recording (except the LPO live label already has two “Titans” among its relatively small amount of releases), but fortunately the Shostakovich was taped with an eye to publication; a patching session followed immediately after the concert. Much to look forward to.

More on the London orchestra scene soon.