Saturday 16 November 2024
The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
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A celebration of the human spirit: the cello concerto Shostakovich wrote for his 60th birthday; Richard Strauss’s description of a heroic life; an Anna Clyne UK premiere inspired by Buddhist writings and Mozart.
Anna Clyne This Moment (UK premiere)
Anna Clyne is the BBC Philharmonic’s Composer in Association. In 2023, she was commissioned to write a new work for the Philadelphia Orchestra. The piece was premiered with, and partly inspired by, Mozart’s Requiem, and quotes directly from that piece. It was also a reaction to the shared loss and grief of the pandemic.
“The meditation on death is a very important meditation. When you meditate on death, you love life more, you cherish life more. We can learn many lessons from it.”
Thích Nhất Hạnh
This Moment was also inspired by the work of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Zen Master and peace activist, Thích Nhất Hạnh, known as the ‘father of mindfulness’, who died in 2022 at the age of 95. Before his death, he told his followers not to contain his ashes in an urn,
‘If I am anywhere, it is in your mindful breathing and in your peaceful steps.’
The title of Clyne’s piece is inspired by another quotation from Nhất Hạnh, ‘this moment is full of wonders.’ She told Alex Ariff in a YouTube interview that Mozart’s Requiem is ‘bursting at the seams with wonder’, and that she wanted to match the drama of that piece.
Clyne told Ariff that the first quotation from the Requiem came from the ‘Kyrie’, an ‘ascending chromatic line in the sopranos, and the first fugal subject in the basses.’ The second was from the ‘Lacrimosa’, the first line of which, ‘Lacrimosa dies illa’ [that day of tears and mourning] reminded her of another quote from Nhất Hạnh, ‘the tears I shed yesterday have become rain.’
The piece, for large orchestra, began mysteriously, with enigmatic strings chords and a bowed gong, and a rising romantic figure with gorgeous harmonies. It slowly eased itself into another, stately theme, and then into a lower key with brass and woodwind flourishes. The piece built to a climax, with meditative woodwind swirling above a Requiem quote in the strings. A further climax led to quieter, limpid textures and a brief hiatus. A Mozart theme in the brass led to an unexpected key change, and a new theme with shimmering glockenspiel. A baroque-style melody led to a serene ending to this evocative and highly effective work.
Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 2
The rest of the concert featured the composer as hero of their own work. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Cello Concerto No. 2 to celebrate his 60th birthday on 25 September 1966, dedicating the work to the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Strauss wrote Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s life) as an unashamedly joyful celebration of his heroic life as a composer, and his disdain for his critics. But the view of the hero in each work could not have been more different. As Robert Matthew-Walker wrote about the Shostakovich concerto, it ‘unveils no great Romantic hero battling against orchestral might.’
The concerto opened with an intense, low theme on the cello joined by low strings. The concentration on soloist Alban Gerhardt’s face was evident throughout, and he barely took his fingers or bow off his cello during the whole piece, stopping once to throw a glancing smile at conductor Alpesh Chauhan, and on another occasion when the orchestra allowed him brief respite. The concerto was played as one continuous movement, making this a remarkable feat of concentration, memory, virtuosity and the expression of profound dark emotion by Gerhardt.
Although the orchestra was huge, it often felt like a chamber orchestra, with individual sections – often the massed lower strings – accompanying the cello as Gerhardt played with passionate vibrato. The first movement featured a series of thrillingly bizarre duets: cello and xylophone with leaping, dystopian woodwind; cello and a robust bass drum; cello and a plaintive, mellow solo horn.
Shostakovich was at his most sardonic when he wrote the second movement, based on a street song from Odessa, Bubliki, Kupite Bubliki!’ [Bagels, buy my bagels]. Gerard McBurney described the song as, ‘saucy, cheap, vulgar and indecent’. Apparently the bagel-seller had, ‘more to offer than bread rolls.’ The story goes that Shostakovich, when asked to play his favourite melody at a New Year’s Eve party, teased the other guests by choosing this one. It’s also evidence of Shostakovich learning from Mahler’s symphonies in his use of folk song. On Saturday, Gerhardt dug deep into his strings, bringing out the sarcasm of the writing, with bitter slides up and down the fingerboard, accompanied by grumbling low winds. The xylophone joined the macabre dance, sounding like a dancing skeleton.
There was another strange but effective pairing with the cello in the third movement, this time with a solo tambourine. There was a brief moment of consonance with a serene, lyrical classical theme ending with an elegant trill from Gerhardt. This theme appeared again several times amongst the organised mayhem of the rest of the movement. Gerhardt’s playing was profound as he again dug deep, sometimes angular and lyrical, sometimes light and subtle, sometimes beautifully smooth as the mood demanded. He was again joined by an array of percussion – solo xylophone, and what felt at times like a jazz band. The full orchestra had a brief chance to assert itself with a return of the folk song from the second movement, complete with the sound of whips. But it was left to the cello and percussion to end the piece, as in Shostakovich’s 15th symphony which also ends with percussion. The cello had the final statement, but only just, a long held note subsiding briefly after the other instruments had given up.
To end the first half, Gerhardt delighted the audience with an encore, Moderato by Mstislav Rostropovich, one of two studies for solo cello written in the 1940s but not published in Moscow until 1972. As Gerhardt said, the work had nothing to do with Shostakovich or the atmosphere of the cello concerto, although Rostropovich was an obvious connection. In Gerhardt’s performance it was great fun, jolly and virtuosic with so much double stopping that a times it almost felt as if Gerhardt was accompanying himself to create a string quartet.
Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben
In 1898, Richard Strauss wrote to a friend from the Bavarian Alps, with what Robert Philip described as ‘characteristic irony’
“As Beethoven’s Eroica is so very unpopular with our conductors and is therefore seldom performed nowadays, I am meeting a pressing need by composing a great tone poem entitled “A Hero’s Life” (true, it has no funeral march, but it is in E flat major and does have lots of horns, horns being quite the thing to express heroism).”
Richard Strauss, letter to a friend July 1898
The stage on Saturday was specially extended to accommodate all the 100 or so players needed for Richard Strauss’s description of his heroic life as a composer, which he completed in 1898. In the opening movement, ‘The Hero’, conductor Alpesh Chauhan brought out the individual heroic themes very clearly – this movement can sound muddled with such a large orchestra. The ensemble in the low and upper strings was impeccable.
The second movement, ‘The Hero’s Adversaries’ , began with a characterful description of a swarm of irritating critics [did Strauss mean us?!] and weary strings expressing Strauss’s response to them. Wagnerian chromaticism brought some Parsifal-like regret. The sniping critics returned, but were overtaken and obliterated by the joyful playing of the rest of the orchestra.
The highlight of the BBC Phil’s performance was the third movement, ‘The Hero’s Female Companion’, referring to Strauss’s wife, the opera singer Pauline de Ahna. This movement was in effect a short violin concerto, with the Leader of the orchestra Zoë Beyers taking the solo part in a stunning performance. Beyers described the female companion’s various moods, her playing alternately sweet, emotive, tender, flirtatious, deeply passionate, sensual and skittish, contrasting with the lugubrious bass theme representing her husband. There was a spellbinding bloom of orchestral sound as a huge, sweeping Romantic tune showed the couple united in love, overcoming the snarky critics who briefly tried to break in at the end.
Offstage trumpets announced ‘The Hero’s Battlefield’, in which we experienced the visceral thrill of a massive orchestra, with fiercely war-like percussion, stentorian trumpets, and golden-sounding horns, conductor Chauhan dancing with delight on the podium as the hero won his battle.
The fifth movement, ‘The Hero’s Works of Peace’ was an ecstatic summary of the composer’s work to date, including quotations from Don Juan (1888), Death and Transfiguration (1889) Don Quixote (1897), and Till Eulenspiegel (1894–95) recently performed by the BBC Philharmonic at the Bridgewater Hall. The brass were magnificent in this movement, and the timpani must have been hit harder than they have ever been hit before in the Bridgewater Hall.
The final movement, ‘The Hero’s Retreat from the World and Fulfilment’ began with an ominous tuba theme from the critics and the hero’s anger in return. A lovely cor anglais solo from Lydia Griffiths led to a pastoral section and a return of the solo violin and the horn theme from earlier, Chauhan conducting delicately now, with one foot slightly raised. Although the critics briefly re-appeared, the piece ended in a blaze of Romantic glory, with a nod to Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) as the lovers retreated into their love nest. Chauhan gave numerous, well-deserved ‘curtain calls’ to individual soloists and whole sections of the orchestra, bringing a lovely evening to a close.
Performers
Alban Gerhardt cello
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Alpesh Chauhan (Principal Guest Conductor of the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra and Music Director of Birmingham Opera Company) conductor
Repertoire
Anna Clyne This Moment (UK premiere commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra in 2023)
Dmitri Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 2
Mstislav Rostropovich Moderato (encore)
Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben
Sources
Ariff, Alex, A Conversation with Composer Anna Clyne (WRTImusic YouTube 30/01/2024)
Philip, Robert, The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music (Yale University Press, 2020)
Schuh, Willi, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years, 1864–1898, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Bryant, Miranda, From MLK to Silicon Valley, how the world fell for ‘father of mindfulness’ (The Observer 22 January 2022)
Clyne, Anna Programme Note on This Moment
Matthew-Walker, Robert, Sleeve Notes to Shostakovich Cello Concerto No 2 in G major, Op 126/Britten Cello Symphony (Hyperion Records/Signum Classics)
Burney, Gerald Repertoire Note on Concerto for Cello and Orchestra No. 2 in G major op. 126 (1966) by Shostakovich (Boosey & Hawkes)
Saturday’s concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 in Concert on Wednesday 20 November at 7.30pm. It will be available for 30 days after broadcast via BBC Sounds.