WHAT IS BBC Television up to? This year’s Henry Wood Proms, promoted of course by the BBC, included two incontestable masterpieces of the 20th century. One was Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, which was televised. The other was Vaughan Williams’s Job, which was not.
The odd thing is that Job was part of an all-VW Prom, and the other three works in the concert were, in fact, recorded for BBC2.
The concert, on 26 August, the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, was excellent. It began with the strings of the BBC Symphony Orchestra giving a noble account of the Tallis Fantasia. The small Second Orchestra was ranged in a horizontal line upstage, enabling the eye as well as the ear to appreciate the antiphonal effects.
The Fantasia was followed by the Serenade to Music, which Vaughan Williams composed for Sir Henry Wood’s jubilee concert in 1938. If the 16 solo singers were not of a standing equal to that of their distinguished predecessors, they none the less shone in their brief solos and blended well as an ensemble. The concert ended with the Ninth Symphony, a late work that scarcely bore out the programme-note writer’s strange assertion that “it is nowadays considered . . . perhaps his greatest symphony”.
But the highlight was Job, “A Masque for Dancing”, first staged with designs by Gwen Raverat, the author of Period Piece and a cousin of the composer. Sir Andrew Davis elicited such delicacy from the orchestra that the Pastoral Dance sounded like Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. Satan’s Dance of Triumph was vicious — the saxophone representing Job’s comforters could not have been oilier; the organ was spine-tingling at Satan’s enthronement.
Why Vaughan Williams wrote a tune of such banality for the Galliard of the Sons of the Morning is a mystery, but the gentle ending quickly effaced the memory. It was all splendid: but a televised recording could have shown the Blake engravings on which Geoffrey Keynes’s scenario was based. What a missed opportunity.
SHOSTAKOVICH’s Tenth Symphony was broadcast on BBC4 on 7 September. Composed in the year of Stalin’s death, it is at once an expression of despair and defiance, from the dark beginning — straight out of Stravinsky’s Firebird — to the fortissimo repetitions of the composer’s musical motto at the end.
Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic were especially gripping in the violent second movement, which may have been conceived as a portrait of Stalin.
Even finer, in this cornucopia of foreign orchestras, was Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Bernard Haitink on 9 September. Withdrawn by the composer when it was in rehearsal in 1936, after his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been execrated in Pravda, the symphony did not re-emerge until 1961.
It is a long work, deeply pessimistic throughout, but Haitink’s command of the structure was absolute. The slow fade, to the chimes of a celesta, was magical. The only blot was the fluffing of the principal horn — normally one of the Chicago’s stars — who had unfortunately been equally fallible in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony on the previous evening.
Preceding the Shostakovich was Murray Perahia in Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto, K491: a profound performance in which the slow movement was decorated more than usual with embellishments that always sounded apt.
AS WELL AS the 50th anniversary of the death of Vaughan Williams, the Proms also marked the centenary of the birth of Olivier Messiaen. On 17 August, Messiaen’s 60-year tenure as organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris was acknowledged with a fine recital by Jennifer Bate. It comprised the Apparition de l’église éternelle, composed in 1932, and La Nativité du Seigneur, which was written three years later.
I missed the Berlin Philharmonic’s Turangalîla Symphony, but on 7 September came Messiaen’s only opera, Saint Francis of Assisi. Including two intervals, one short and one long, this was a marathon of nearly six hours. Billed as a concert performance, it was in fact semi-staged: the singers were in costume, made exits and entrances, and eschewed copies of the score.
Apart from a soprano who sings the Angel, the voices are all male —the rest of the cast consists of St Francis, six Brothers, and a Leper. There is chant, there is birdsong, and a near-fatal absence of drama. Messiaen, a great teacher, could have learnt from Wagner, Janáèek, and, indeed, Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites; but he was no man of the theatre, as he himself recognised.
There are some beautiful passages — the gamelan-like opening, the Angel singing in thirds with the woodwind — but too much of the vocal music is slow-moving, and sometimes the harmony verges on the sentimental. The final chorus recalled both Prokofiev’s War and Peace and the American musical.
The performance by the Netherlands Opera was superbly conducted by Ingo Metzmacher. Chorus and orchestra (the Hague Philharmonic) were more than equal to Messiaen’s demands, and the men, led by Rod Gilfry as the saint, coped triumphantly with bricks containing only moderate amounts of straw. What lingered in the memory, though, apart from the dazzling orchestral colours, was the pure sound of Heidi Grant Murphy’s Angel.
So, too, did parts of Hérodiade-Fragmente, a “dramatic scene” for soprano and orchestra composed by Matthias Pintscher in 1999. In the verses by Mallarmé, Herodias contemplates her reflection in a mirror and waits “for something unknown”. The early part was a depressing reversion to the 1970s, all stabbing chords and shrieking; but later on came passages of the utmost subtlety, the voice blending into and emerging from high notes on violins and woodwind. Marisol Montalvo gave a virtuoso performance with Christoph Eschenbach and the Orchestre de Paris.
The season also boasted a plethora of attractive choral concerts. I was sorry to miss Bach’s St John Passion under Sir John Eliot Gardiner, of which I heard excellent reports, but I caught a couple on BBC4: Pierre Boulez in his element with the motor rhythms of Janáèek’s Glagolitic Mass with BBC forces on 15 August; and Richard Hickox, his excellence with choirs surely making him the Malcolm Sargent of our day, getting a tender performance two days later from the BBC Singers and the City of London Sinfonia in Beethoven’s Mass in C.
In between came Handel’s Belshazzar, an oratorio that gets a good press but which is short on really memorable numbers. The performance under Sir Charles Mackerras sounded as though more rehearsal would not have come amiss: Belshazzar was out of time in his first aria, and there was a messy cadence in Cyrus’s “Amaz’d to find the foe so near”. The stars were Rosemary Joshua as Nitocris, Belshazzar’s mother, and the Choir and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
The Verdi Requiem on 31 August under Jiøí Bĕlohlávek — BBC forces again — never quite took off. Individually, the soloists were fine: the tenor Joseph Calleja excelled in the “Ingemisco”, but he always sang too loud in the ensembles. Of the two late-night concerts I attended, Sir John Tavener’s The Whale seemed dated; whereas, on 12 August, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir’s performance under Paul Hillier of Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, better known as the Vespers, transcended all sense of time. Magnificent!
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