Orchestral
Malcolm Hayes finds there is no need for extras in the LSO’S inaugural concert under its new music director
This is Rattle
Thomas Adès: Asyla; Harrison Birtwistle: Violin Concerto; Elgar: Enigma Variations; Helen Grime: Fanfares; Knussen: Symphony No. 3 (Dvd/blu-ray) Christian Tetzlaff (violin); London Symphony Orchestra/simon Rattle LSO Live LSO 3066 115 mins This is an ultra-straight presentation of the opening concert of Rattle’s tenure as music director of the LSO: there are no visual gimmicks, no additional features, and not even the titles of the works in the programme are shown (so it’s worth checking the cue numbers on your remote to make sure you’re hearing the music you think you are). Rattle’s support for British composers, or at least a choice of them, is genuine and longstanding, and four of their 20th- and 21st-century works are represented here.
Two of these stand out. Rattle conducted the first performance of Thomas Adès’s Asyla with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1997, and it has been widely performed since, so that its brilliance has become rather taken for granted. The dazzling panache of the LSO’S playing has you wondering all over again at the mesmerising range of options that Adès’s ear and technical command can summon.
Harrison Birtwistle’s Violin Concerto, too, is a masterfully sustained score, with Christian Tetzlaff’s powerhouse virtuosity here matched by impressive weight of accompanying tone from the LSO strings in particular. And Elgar’s Enigma Variations yet again sound as fresh as the day they were written: Rattle conjures a stellar orchestral response in each one, with the camera-work catching the players’ faces as they savour a score that truly offers something for all of them.
The notoriously cramped sound of Barbican Hall recordings now evidently belongs to the past: the combination here of clear detail and accommodating space is near-ideal.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
PICTURE AND SOUND ★★★★★
Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com
John Adams
Common Tones in Simple Time; Harmonielehre; Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Montreal Symphony Orchestra/
Kent Nagano
Decca 483 4938 68:01 mins
Planned for John Adams’s 70th birthday in 2017, this album now appears to mark Kent Nagano’s last season with the Montreal orchestra. The end product appears somewhat carelessly packaged: the booklet notes overly rely on quotations from Adams’s website, and are only legible with a magnifying glass and torch.
The music-making is legible, but the sound, live from three public concerts, is serviceable when much of the music needs the spectacular. A longtime Adams champion, Nagano shapes and sustains the floating, constantly mutating textures of Common Tones in Simple Time (1979) – Adams’s first work for orchestra, which now almost sounds more like the work of musical ecologist John Luther Adams than Adams himself. Nagano shows equal skill in maintaining those long, keening lyrical lines in Harmonielehre
(1985), where minimalism shakes hands with late Romanticism to the refreshment of both.
Yet, aside from Common Tones, nothing places this so-titled The John Adams Album above similar albums devoted to the composer. Michael Tilson Thomas’s 2010 Harmonielehre with the San Francisco Symphony offers a bolder acoustic, greater dynamism, bigger emotions and the option of surround sound. Nagano’s appears a little more earthbound, less strongly felt. Geoff Brown PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★
Beethoven • R Strauss
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (Eroica); Strauss: Metamorphosen Sinfonia Grange Au Lac/ Esa-pekka Salonen
Alpha Classics ALPHA 544 75:20 mins Twenty-five years after it was built in Évian-les-bains with then-artistic director Mstislav Rostropovich at the helm, La Grange au Lac, the wonderfully idiosyncratic wooden
Rattle conjures a stellar orchestral response in each of Elgar’s variations
concert hall surrounded by birch trees (and containing a small thicket behind the concert platform itself) has acquired its own symphony orchestra to celebrate. This recording was made in July last year at the inaugural concert of this emerging orchestral outfit, a festival orchestra of sorts, its youthful(ish) line-up hand-picked from top European orchestras and ensembles from Vienna to London, with Esa-pekka Salonen at the helm.
The pairing of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 – Eroica – and Strauss’s Metamorphosen was apparently predicated on Strauss’s quotation of the former’s ‘Marcia Funebre’ in the Adagio of his Metamorphosen. Yet despite the allusion, it is a somewhat jarring stylistic and emotional jump from the intensity of the dying notes of the Metamorphosen to the opening of the Beethoven. The Strauss, to open, shimmers with deconstructed clarity, its intertwining lines following their own course and yet largely in the pursuit of the whole – there is no over-egged intensity here. But whilst there are instrumental and artistic strengths in the Eroica
– the quiet, powerful momentum of the ‘Marcia Funebre’, the lovely horns in the Scherzo, and moments where Salonen’s vision has clearly communicated to the orchestra beyond markings on a page – there are moments where its disparate parts remain so, and the work lacks that final overall thrill. Or, to put it another way, sometimes you can’t see the wood for the (birch) trees. Sarah Urwin Jones
PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Brahms
Symphonies Nos 1 & 3
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/ Edward Gardner
Chandos CHSA 5236 (hybrid CD/SACD) 81:27 mins
Brahms’s marking for the main portion of the opening movement of his First Symphony is a plain Allegro, but Edward Gardner takes it at an unusually swift tempo, keeping the drama buoyant and avoiding any undue ponderousness. (Who but Brahms would provide a symphony in a minor key with a sombre introduction not only to the first movement, but also the finale?) The feeling of transparency is helped, too, by having the first and second violins divided left and right. Gardner’s view of the music allows him to observe the seldom-heard repeat of the first stage without stretching the piece out unduly, but at the same time it means that his relaxation of tempo for the exposition’s more expressive second half is fairly extreme.
The finale’s introduction presents in slow motion everything that will be heard in an accelerated form later, and like most conductors Gardner applies the brakes for the return of the solemn trombone chorale just before the close, making it into a grandiose statement. In my experience, Otto Klemperer was alone in demonstrating that the moment could work very well when played in tempo.
The outer movements of the Symphony No. 3 are again refreshingly lithe, while Gardner’s lingering performances of the middle movements are particularly beautiful. Misha Donat PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Bruckner
Symphony No. 1 (1891 version); Symphony No. 9 Lucerne Festival Orchestra/ Claudio Abbado
Lucerne Festival ACC30489
173 mins (2 discs)
These are live performances by the superlative Lucerne Festival Orchestra in the last two years of Claudio Abbado’s life. The First Symphony was a favourite of his – he recorded it many years earlier, albeit in its first version. This new account is of the 1891 version created over 20 years after the original version, when Bruckner took two years off to revise several of his earlier works: the result I find far superior. The most characteristic movement is the Scherzo, a driving affair with a whimsical Trio which might belong to one of the later symphonies. The other movements show Bruckner still learning his craft, but I find them full of interest and beauty, if formally rather a mess. Any few bars taken alone sound wonderful, but Bruckner has not yet learnt the art of transition, which gives the symphony an inadvertently modern effect.
The Ninth was Bruckner’s farewell to the world, and Abbado’s. This performance from 2013 effortlessly achieves the sublime. It is less fiercely dramatic than some accounts, such as Furtwängler’s from October 1944, or Gielen’s last great recording. Abbado goes more for lucidity, slow build-ups, sheer beauty of sound, though when it comes to the last cataclysm he is there with the greatest. The ending of this amazing work – peace or unease? – is perfectly rendered in this account, and fortunately no applause follows. The engineers have done their work perfectly. Both composer and conductor would surely have been happy with this result of their labours. Michael Tanner
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Chadwick • Elgar
Elgar: Falstaff;
Chadwick: Tam O’shanter
Timothy West, Samuel West,
Erik Chapman, Billy Wiz (narrators); BBC National Orchestra of Wales/ Andrew Constantine
Orchid Classics ORC100103
106:42 mins (2 discs)
A month before Elgar conducted the premiere of his symphonic poem Falstaff in 1913, he published an essay breaking the through-composed score into four discrete sections for analysis. Conductor Andrew Constantine has taken that division a step further by prefacing each of these sections with spoken dialogue from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, adumbrating in words what is described in Elgar’s music.
His actors are straight out of
A-list casting – the father-and-son team Timothy and Samuel West voice the parts, including Falstaff and Prince Hal, creating a musicodramatic continuum lasting 50 minutes in total. The results are entertaining, though possibly not for regular listening. Recognising this, a complete, uninterrupted performance of Falstaff has been added on a second disc, where the BBC National Orchestra of Wales give a bristlingly characterful account of Elgar’s score which competes colourfully with the many others available.
The American George Chadwick was a contemporary of Elgar, and his ‘symphonic ballade’ Tam O’shanter traces the narrative of Burns’s famous poem in a single 20-minute movement. Again, Constantine enlists two actors – Erik Chapman and Billy Wiz – to dramatise the preface Chadwick included in his score, but there are no breaks in the music itself. The BBC players tuck into Chadwick’s piece with gusto, especially in the feverish and brilliantly scored Alloway
Kirk episode.
Orchid’s engineering has both power and transparency, and this disc has real interpretive quality to offer. Terry Blain
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
R Strauss
Also sprach Zarathustra;
Tod und Verklärung; Till Eulenspiegel; Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils
Lucerne Festival Orchestra/ Riccardo Chailly
Decca 483 3080 85:17 mins
Since the loss of its reason for existence, Claudio
Abbado, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra has turned into just another sleek superband, despite the remaining presence of many key players (flautist Jacques Zoon, viola players Wolfgang Christ and Veronika Hagen and trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich). The flashes of individuality here – the solo violins dreamy in the incandescent epilogue of Also sprach Zarathustra (though much less outstanding in the Dance-song), D clarinet screaming as the noose is tightened around Till Eulenspiegel’s neck, the sad oboe solo near the start of Death and Transfiguration and the eerie flute in ‘Salome’s Dance’ – only make one wish there were more.
Interpretatively, it’s Riccardo Chailly business as usual: exemplary textures, especially in the string hymn, ‘Grave Song’ and first fugue of Zarathustra, as well as suddenly striking space for the famous ‘nature theme’ before the investigation of science leads to a furious collapse, but not as much forward movement or flying through the air as there should be.
Both the bigger tone-poems need more space around the sound; it’s a pity there’s spotlighting when we need to take a mid-stalls seat in Lucerne’s KKL hall and hear this magnificent beast as naturally as we could Haitink’s Concertgebouw Orchestra in their hall back in
1970 – still a benchmark for sound and shape. Till Eulenspiegel is better; fleet and quick-witted, as it should be, and Salome duly undulates in lurex, but these aren’t the main selling-points of a disc that, admittedly, is generous at 85 minutes. David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★
Tchaikovsky
The Tchaikovsky Project: Symphonies Nos 1-6; Piano Concertos Nos 1-3; Romeo and Juliet; Francesca da Rimini; Serenade for Strings
Kirill Gerstein (piano);
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/ Semyon Bychkov
Decca 483 4942 496:44 mins (7 discs)
It is tempting to think of Semyon Bychkov as a first-class conductor of earth and fire, with air and water less conspicuous elements in his psychological constitution. But that image is often belied in this complex range of always handsome-sounding interpretations, a recording project that spans the last years of the great Ji í B lohlávek as principal conductor of the Czech Philharmonic and the takeover of the colleague he so approved.
Starting at the end, with the
First and Second Symphonies, I imagined that the rather heavy hand which impedes the flight of the First’s Scherzo, turns the Second’s Andantino marziale into a slow movement and overweights the Serenade for Strings would come into its own the darker and deeper Tchaikovsky goes in his later symphonies.
To a certain extent that’s true: I know no more trenchant or sonically amazing opening of the Manfred Symphony, with its black-bronze colours gilded by emotional string portamentos, and the tragic heights of the Fourth’s first movement are impressively scaled; Bychkov always seems to know where to place the emphasis in emotional climaxes. Otherwise, though, he’s less predictable than
I thought he might be. The Allegro con anima of the Fifth and the fight music of Romeo and Juliet really fly; there’s a perfect sense of fastish tense and slow release about the songs of love and death in a great Pathétique. The Third, like Manfred, is a special achievement – in this case in Bychkov’s smoothing out of the more square-cut themes of the outer movements, but not too much, to make them flow. It certainly works for me better than in any other interpretation I know.
Kirill Gerstein is the perfect partner in the two-and-a-bit concertos featured (would that they’d included the Concert Fantasia, too, my personal favourite for its adventurous eccentricity). He shares Bychkov’s balance of big guns and mercurial delicacy, with the same perfect sense of shades (in the orchestral playing, there are plenty of magical pianissimos, not least in a dreamlike pizzicato for the scherzo of the Fourth). It’s good to have the joint championship of Tchaikovsky’s preferred 1879 thoughts about the First Piano Concerto (arpeggiating start, a bit of extra development music in the finale), which I hope will become standard, and the full version of No. 2, now thankfully the norm, allows for superlative solos from (uncredited) leader and principal cellist.
The sound is a beauty, relishing that bloom and resonance you get in Prague’s Rudolfinum without the Czech Phil ever sounding too soft-grained. If you seek singledisc issues only, Manfred and the Pathétique certainly won’t disappoint as among the very best in a crowded field. David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Quattro Violini a Venezia
Works by Castello, Fontana, Gabrieli, Marini, Rossi et al Clematis/stéphanie de Failly,
Brice Sailly
Ricercar RIC 404 64:35 mins
‘Four violins in Venice’ is a catchy but rather misleading title. This anthology of 17th-century string chamber music, played by the Belgian-based group Clematis, contains pieces not only from Venice but from all over northern Italy. And sonatas and other works featuring four violins were actually something of a rarity in the period. So there are also items for smaller numbers of violins, including some delightful essays in the use of echo effects, and a couple of fascinating pieces by Biagio Marini in which a single violin simulates a larger grouping by playing respectively polyphony on two strings and chords ‘in the manner of a lyre’.
The idiom of the music is attractive, and the performances are fluent, though the recording doesn’t always allow the violins to soar free of their continuo accompaniment into the church acoustic. But the disc works best as musical wallpaper, which the performers surely didn’t intend. The pieces are so short and the composers so numerous that the listener doesn’t get much sense of individual personalities or the development of the early Baroque sonata. Perhaps Clematis might offer some meatier ‘composer portraits’? Anthony Burton PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★