Rihm’s inventive concerto seems like an entrancing mirage
BBC Symphony Orchestra Barbican Hall ‘There’s always a worm in the apple, a strangeness in the harmony, a sudden wrong sound’
Like everything else, classical music has “gone global”. Not so long ago a Russian orchestra sounded poles apart from an American one, and contemporary music, too, had its national schools. Boulez’s filigree decoration seemed indomitably French, and Steve Reich’s groovy pattern-making unmistakably American. But these days younger composers can seem entirely rootless.
Last night’s concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra was a reminder that there are still composers who know exactly where they belong, culturally speaking. Together with pianist Nicholas Hodges, they played the 2nd Piano Concerto by Wolfgang Rihm, who is German to his fingerends. Now in his mid-sixties, Rihm is a towering figure in German music, not just because of his vast output but also for his doughty support of fellow composers and orchestras under threat of closure (yes, such things happen even in Germany). Much of Rihm’s music sounds like an attempt to recreate the lost and longed-for world of late-romantic Germanic composers like Mahler and Strauss. The attempt never quite comes off. There’s always a worm in the apple, a strangeness in the harmony, a sudden intrusion of a wrong sound that reminds us just how much time has passed between now and then.
This piano concerto was a case in point. It began with a shapely, nostalgic clarinet melody, beautifully played by Richard Hosford, answered with delicate grace by Nicholas Hodges. It was like a distorted memory of one of Schumann’s domestic chamber pieces. But soon the sounds grew more intense, and the weave of melodic lines more and more dense. High trumpets, like something out of one of Mahler’s more nightmarish scherzos, pierced through the harmonic haze, the balance between the two exactly judged by conductor Lothar Koenigs.
The middle section of this big one-movement piece struck a different note, Hodges firing off volleys of brilliant filigree notes, in dialogue with harp and dancing strings. Later came an eloquent slow movement, where Hodges had to tease a melody out of the midst of a dense swirl of notes, like a piece by Brahms. We even had some Liszt-like heroics, complete with emphatic minor chords, which were a shock against the more dissonant sound of the orchestra. After a tremendous cadenza the orchestra seemed about to launch a whole new chapter in the music, but then Hodges played a single note, so quietly we couldn’t be sure we hadn’t imagined it – and it was all over.
The whole thing was like a mirage, always inventive and surprising, not always convincing at the level of detail – which isn’t so surprisingly, because if you’re aiming to create the effect of something seen hazily, at a distance, you don’t have to be very particular about the notes at every point. But the best moments were entrancing.
The concert’s second half was as Germanic as the first, but in a very different way. Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony is as massively grounded and solid as Rihm’s concerto is fleeting and evanescent, but in fact the contrast between them wasn’t as absolute as it might have been.
Koenigs clearly takes the view that this symphony is more a drama than the spacious “cathedral in sound” that many conductors make of it. This doesn’t mean that his speeds were especially brisk, in fact he made the sturdy Scherzo 3rd movement seem impressively massive and deliberate. This pointed up the contrast with the Finale, which here seemed unusually urgent and light on its feet. The orchestral playing wasn’t on the level of the concert’s first half – there were some bumpy transitions and the brass seemed overbearing at times – but none the less it was a winning, humane performance.