From a funeral march to resurrection: superb Mahler in Manchester
Manchester does like Mahler. The Bridgewater Hall was almost full on Saturday evening for a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, ‘Resurrection’, with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Chief Conductor, John Storgårds. The stage was full; the platform had been extended to accommodate all the players, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Chorus occupied the choir stalls.
The Music
Mahler was still composing his First Symphony (performed by the BBC Philharmonic last November) when he began work on the first movement of the Second Symphony in 1888, initially creating the single-movement Todtenfeier (Funeral Rites), a funeral march for the hero of the First Symphony. He wrote the second and third movements in 1893. The second movement celebrates the hero’s life.
The third movement draws its text from one of Mahler’s favourite sources, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of German folk poems and songs. The text, from Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt, describes fish enjoying a sermon by St. Anthony of Padua, only to forget it as soon as they hear it, a wry commentary on the futility of life. The fourth movement takes another Wunderhorn text, Urlicht (Primal Light), which describes the fragility of humanity, ‘O Röschen rot!’ (O tiny rose so red) and the hope of heaven.
Mahler wanted to complete the symphony with a choral movement, following Beethoven’s model from the Ninth Symphony. He struggled to find a text until he went to the funeral of the conductor Hans von Bülow, who didn’t understand Todtenfeier at all but was generally supportive of Mahler’s music. At the funeral, the children’s choir sang a hymn with words by the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Die Auferstehung (The Resurrection). Mahler said he had been struck by lightning; he suddenly had his Finale. He used the first four lines of Klopstock’s poem, ‘Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du…’ (You will rise again, yes, you will rise again…)
On Saturday, the opening of the symphony was remarkable; Storgårds began before we were settled, almost as if he were continuing the First Symphony from November, rather than starting anew. The lower strings were astonishingly fierce, visceral even, accompanied by shimmering upper strings. Storgårds brought out details like the joyously rasping horns. The orchestra played with both precision and passion under Storgårds’ animated conducting. The funeral march proceeded with a rhythmic motif that sounded like the hammer of fate. The march fell away, and he brought out the rich harmonic colours of the woodwind. The string theme brought a quietly ecstatic moment of languid beauty. The two harpists, Richard Allen and En Hudson, played superbly, all the detail of the parts shining out in the hall’s magnificent acoustics. Storgårds created a real sense of shape and inevitability. After an invigorating climax, flautist Alex Jakeman shared a tender duet with leader Zoë Beyers. An ominous rumble marked an explosive return of the opening theme. There was a moment of magic when ponderous lower strings surrounded by filigree woodwinds built to a climax with radiant brass. There was a brief glimpse of the heaven to follow, the upper strings playing with bright, limpid textures, but the horns broke the spell by vacillating anxiously between the major and minor. The movement ended with two plucked chords, before a short break, which the composer himself recommended.
The second movement was a lilting Ländler, with a gentle dance-like theme that had a heart-stopping pause, a moment of sunlight after the funeral march. The strings crept in with a pulsing rhythm, and Storgårds held back the return of the dance, a lovely touch; his use of rubato throughout the movement was superb. Soprano soloist Siobhan Stagg smiled benignly as the orchestra celebrated joyful memories of the hero. A stuttering duet between upper and lower strings created a stunning echo effect. The strings plucked their instruments with the precision of a string quartet. The movement ended with elegant harps and plucked chords.
Mahler used an evocative image to describe the third movement, watching dancers through a window without being able to hear the music,
‘The turning and twisting movements of the couples seem senseless… You must imagine that to one who has lost his identity and his happiness, the world looks like this – distorted and crazy, as if reflected in a concave mirror.’
An abrupt timpani flourish led to a melody dancing across the orchestra, like a whirling dervish. There was a touch of the demonic magic as the melody fell away. A long-limbed melody snaked back on itself, and Jakeman played a spritely flute solo. Storgårds brought out the sarcasm in a section that felt like Shostakovich. There was an uneasy moment of light, teeming with life as the music switched uneasily from major to minor. A pirouette on the flute announced a diabolical dance macabre. An anguished cry from the full orchestra was answered by shrieking woodwind and thunderous timpani. The movement ended with an earth-shattering bass note.
As if out of nowhere, Stefanie Irányi’s gorgeous mezzo soprano voice appeared. She sang with very clear diction, like a lieder singer, and held herself inwardly with a commanding stage presence. Henrietta Cooke played a lovely cor anglais solo. Irányi was passionate on her line ‘Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott’ (From God I come and I shall return to God). The movement ended with her final held note floating above the orchestra.
Long before 5.1 surround sound and Dolby Atmos, and the joys of specialist listening rooms like Polygon Portal in London’s Soho, Mahler used offstage performers to mesmerising effect. In the Finale, the offstage horns, trumpets, and percussion surrounded us; it felt as if the music was coming from all angles, sometimes distant, sometimes very close – trumpeter Holly Clark played only a few feet from where we sat. The opening of the Finale, although it presages the prospect of heaven from the previous movement, is in fact an orchestral showpiece, handled with aplomb by Storgårds, with unusually fast tempi at times. A huge crash, with no fewer than three timpani players, suggested that the symphony had come to a vigorous end… but Mahler wasn’t content with ending it there. An offstage band of rustic musicians battled the onstage orchestra, which eventually won.
A short silence. The choir came in with a beautiful entry, sotto voce, singing without scores as they remained seated. They sang superbly, with excellent intonation and hymn-like reverence. Stagg rose above them with a gorgeous, creamy soprano, warm in her lower range and lovely on her high notes. The orchestra soon joined in the ecstasy. Stagg moved gently from one side to the other, immersed in the music. Irányi’s word-painting was exquisite. Storgårds’ control of the choir’s dynamics was masterful. In a sudden moment of joy, the choir stood to create a moving climax. There was an ecstatic cry of ‘Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben’ (I shall die, in order to live) to mark the prospect of resurrection. Only Mahler himself, in the finale to his Symphony No. 8, has created choral music as majestic as this, and the choir embraced it fully. In a glowingly optimistic ending, Mahler added bells and gongs to create a stunning climax.
The audience rose to its feet to give the performers a standing ovation, with huge and well-deserved applause. They were joined by the Chorus Director, Simon Halsey, who had prepared the choir so well. It’s rare to get this kind of ecstatic reception in Manchester: it felt more like the reaction the orchestra receives at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Then again, Manchester does like Mahler.
Saturday evening’s concert by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Joshua Weilerstein at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, was a celebration of America in the 250th anniversary year of Independence. It featured two composers who moved to New York, and a third who received part of his musical education from American radio. Duke Ellington was born in Washington, DC, and moved to New York, where he celebrated the city in Harlem. Dvořák spent three years there as director of the National Conservatory, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra commissioned him to write his New World Symphony. Nikolai Kapustin was born in Horlivka, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. He began to absorb American musical culture – particularly jazz – as a piano student in Moscow, listening to Voice of America, the US equivalent of the BBC World Service. His Piano Concerto No. 4 is surprisingly jazzy and sounds as if it could have been written in New York.
Harlem recorded live at Tivoli Concert Hall, Copenhagen, in 1964, with Duke Ellington’s spoken-word introduction
The concert began with Duke Ellington’s Harlem, the Duke’s evocation of the area in the Northern section of Manhattan. He often prefaced live performances (such as the one recorded in Copenhagen in 1964) with a spoken-word introduction, setting the scene. His introduction varied from one performance to the next, but broadly, the scenario is a Sunday morning with smartly dressed people going to church. We travel up 7th Avenue through the culturally diverse Spanish and West Indian communities. Everyone is in a friendly mood. As Ellington wrote, ‘
‘You may hear a parade go by, or a funeral, or you may recognise the passage of those who are making Civil Rights demands.’
Ellington wrote the distinctive opening of the piece for the trumpeter Cootie Williams, using a plunger mute to create a dirty, slightly sleazy sound, a two-note theme to express the word ‘Harlem.’ Trumpeter Cameron Chin-See opened the concert on Saturday, and there was an immediate call-and-response with the orchestra. We soon heard from the saxophones, who played superbly with a combination of swing and precision: Carl Raven and Anthony Brown (alto), Andy Hunter and Ben Jackson (tenor) and Jim Fieldhouse (baritone). The piece was episodic as we passed through the different parts of Harlem; this was joyful, foot-tapping music, with rich textures and glowing brass. A syncopated section led to a dancing brass theme, then a serpentine theme on saxes. An early highlight was the jazzy clarinet solo from John Bradbury, with plucked lower strings and a warm four-note falling theme on brass. After a huge climax, there were more superb solos from Elliot Gresty on bass clarinet and Richard Brown on trombone. This led to a section for a small jazz ensemble, followed by a lovely big-band flourish from the full orchestra. The opening ‘Harlem’ trumpet theme returned, and the orchestra took up the melody with an incredibly fast section, perfectly executed. Duke Ellington matched his piece to his band’s performers, writing out solos to match their particular performance practices. So it was appropriate that the virtuosic drummer Obi Jenne (from whom we would hear more later) ended the piece with a stunning drum solo, accompanied by Latin American percussion and vigorous timpani from Paul Turner. How often do you hear a drum solo in a classical concert? This was very different from the last drum solo I heard, from Asaf Sirkis with Soft Machine at Band on the Wall a couple of weeks ago.
While the stage was rearranged to accommodate the piano and move the drum kit, the orchestra’s director Adam Szabo and conductor Joshua Weilerstein discussed the music. Weilerstein said that Ellington came to symphonic music through jazz, and Nikolai Kapustin came to jazz through symphonic music. He described the next piece, Kapustin’s Piano Concerto No. 4, as ‘very wacky.’ He wasn’t wrong. In his review for Gramophone, Jeremy Nicholas described it as ‘a riot’:
‘A carefully notated extended improvisation by the great Peter Nero … and Oscar Peterson (an important influence on Kapustin), fully orchestrated by Ravel and Henry Mancini with further input from Art Tatum, Count Basie and Bill Evans.’
Szabo pointed out that the drum kit is often part of the percussion section, but in this performance, it was moved to the front so that drummer Obi Jenne and piano soloist Frank Dupree could face each other. Weilerstein joked that the drummer was really the boss in the piano concerto, although Jenne wouldn’t admit this. After so many brass instruments featured in the Ellington piece, it was a surprise to see only strings, three woodwind players and timpani on stage; the concerto often felt like a duet between piano and drums with orchestral embellishment. This blog also covers progressive rock, so there was another (joyful) surprise for your reviewer to hear the opening section of the concerto, a mixture of jazz, rock and blues that was very reminiscent of the great Keith Emerson of prog rock titans Emerson, Lake and Palmer. John Peel called them a ‘waste of talent and electricity’, to which Emerson replied, ‘At least he accepted that we had talent!’
Frank Dupree certainly demonstrated his talent on Saturday. His playing was astonishing. Sometimes he was a virtuoso jazz player, his fingers flying across the keyboard; sometimes he played as if he were the soloist in a twentieth-century romantic piano concerto, with a lovely touch; sometimes he could have been in a jazz bar, playing stride piano or blues. It was difficult to predict where this eccentric but exhilarating music would go next. In his long, written-out, solo cadenza, Dupree shone as the orchestral players watched, mesmerised. It was fascinating to watch Jenne, sometimes brushing the drums lightly like a jazz drummer, sometimes playing more heavily like a rock drummer, the kick drum sounding out clearly from his position at the front of the stage. After the piano cadenza, the orchestra rejoined, and they scampered to a stunning end. Dupree and Jenne acknowledged each other with huge smiles.
Dupree asked us if we wanted more; well, of course we did! Jenne joined him again for his encore, Kapustin’s Concert Etude No. 1. This was a great showpiece for both players, but, to coin a phrase, less ‘wacky’ than the previous piece…. until… we saw Dupree creeping round the back of the piano to the drum kit… He joined Jenne in a drum solo that turned into a duet on drums, thunderous but witty as the two of them explored the kit together. This was the first time I had ever seen a joint drum solo; the audience loved it!
Weilerstein introduced Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 ‘From the New World’, which filled the whole second half, as a piece that never gets old, music that’s ‘so inviting and simple… with something for everyone.’ He had conducted it at least 15-20 times, and it always felt different. There’s no doubt that his time in America had an effect on Dvořák’s music; writing about the works he wrote there, including this symphony and the Cello Concerto, he said,
‘I should never have composed these works “just so” if I hadn’t seen America.’
There’s a school of thought that says that he was directly influenced by American music, particularly African American spirituals and work songs. He wrote that this music was
‘distinguished by unusual and subtle harmonies, the like of which I have found in no other songs but those of old Scotland and Ireland’.
The counter-argument is that Dvořák doesn’t directly quote any African American melodies, and that the melodies he wrote himself could just as easily have been inspired by European folk music.
Whatever the source of Dvořák’s inspiration, the BBC Philharmonic gave an inspired account of the symphony on Saturday. Weilerstein brought out a real sense of the work’s overarching shape, but also lots of detail; this well-known work felt fresh in his hands. The orchestra was in sparkling form. In the first movement, the flutes (Alex Jakeman and Victoria Daniel) were outstanding. In response to the conductor’s grand gestures, the final climax of the movement was faster than it’s sometimes played, but the orchestra handled the tempo with supreme aplomb, reaching a stunning climax.
Boy on the Bike – Hovis advert’s 2019 restoration | BFI
The second movement does have an American influence – the composer said it was inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha, although there’s some disagreement about which part of the poem it refers to. To British audiences of a certain age, the movement will forever be associated with The Bike Ride or Boy on Bike, better known as simply The Hovis Advert, directed by Ridley Scott (director of Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise and Gladiator). The advert used a brass arrangement played by Ashington Colliery Band, but on Saturday, the familiar melody was superbly played by Rachel Clegg on cor anglais, set against gorgeous, Wagnerian brass chords. The woodwinds provided a characterful response; they were excellent throughout the symphony, particularly when depicting birdsong. There was a spellbinding passage when the strings played incredibly quietly with perfect ensemble; the audience sat rapt.
Dvořák said that the third movement was also inspired by The Song of Hiawatha, and this time, he was more specific: he wrote that it represented the dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis at his wedding feast. The orchestra played the opening section, which recalls Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with phenomenal speed and precision. The horns shone as they played a chromatic theme, and the woodwind danced throughout the movement. The orchestra played with Baroque precision and limpid textures as Weilerstein danced on his podium, with a perfectly co-ordinated final chord. In the final movement, the brass section was in full flow, playing their early fanfare with military precision. After a joyful folk dance from the strings, the woodwind birdsong returned with a lovely clarinet solo. The orchestra played the ‘Three Blind Mice’ melody with playful simplicity. After a series of climaxes, interspersed with quieter sections as Weilerstein controlled the dynamics beautifully, the orchestra’s final statement was anguished yet thrilling. Weilerstein let his left hand fall slowly to give us time to consider what we had just heard, before there was rapturous applause in response to an emotional performance that was both exhausting to listen to – it was so good – and ultimately, cathartic.
Repertoire
Duke Ellington Harlem Nikolai Kapustin Piano Concerto No. 4 Nikolai Kapustin Concert Etude No. 1 (encore) Antonín Dvořák Symphony No. 9 ‘From the New World’
Performers
BBC PhilharmonicOrchestra Joshua Weilerstein conductor Frank Dupree piano
Sources
Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress (Doubleday, 1973) Jeremy Nicholas, KAPUSTIN Piano Concerto No 4. Concerto for Violin & Piano. Chamber Symphony (Frank Dupree) (Gramophone)
The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 7.30 pm on Wednesday 22 April 2026 at 7.30 on In Concert and will be available for 30 days after broadcast
This post was updated at 11.29 on 21 April 2026 to correct the name of the trumpeter in the Duke Ellington piece
Love is a fragile thing: superb performances of Albarn Berg, Sergey Prokofiev and Cassandra Miller by Lawrence Power and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Composer Cassandra Miller, Viola Player Lawrence Power and Members of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Credit: Chris Payne
On The Cure’s comeback album Songs of a Lost World (2024), Robert Smith sang, ‘This love is a fragile thing.’ This line could have been the title of Saturday’s concert by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of French conductor Ludovic Morlot. The concert featured: Alban Berg’s character Lulu from his opera of the same name, whose relationship with her lovers is ephemeral; the fragility of love, and of human existence, addressed in Cassandra Miller’s I cannot love without trembling; and Sergey Prokofiev’s setting of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet depicting the tragic fate of the ‘star-crossed lovers.’
There was a secondary theme in Saturday’s concert: composers persecuted by the regimes in which they lived, and their attempts to subvert those regimes. Alban Berg had become a successful composer in Germany after the premiere of his opera Wozzeck in Berlin in 1925. But with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, it became clear that his next opera, Lulu, was unlikely to be performed in Austria or Germany. The Nazis banned his works in 1935, declaring them to be ‘Entartete Musik’ (Degenerate Music). Berg wrote his Lulu Suite to promote the opera away from the Nazi regime.
At around the same time, Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union after a period of exile. He was in discussions with the State Academic Theatre (later The Kirov) to develop Romeo and Juliet as a ballet, but the project soon fell foul of the authorities. The Theatre cancelled the project, and the Bolshoi agreed to take it on. The Bolshoi’s director was then arrested and executed, and the production was delayed indefinitely. In 1936, Prokofiev extracted two suites from the ballet to generate interest in the complete work.
The concert on Saturday began with the Rondo, the first movement of Berg’s Lulu Suite. Berg extracted a love scene from Act II of the opera, between Lulu and Alwa, the son of Dr Ludwig Schön, one of Lulu’s various husbands. The opening of the movement was delicate and fragile, with solo flute and strings. Conductor Ludovic Morlot calmly brought out the long-limbed, endless melody and the fragility of the melodic lines. But there was an underlying sense of decadence, the solo alto saxophone (Carl Raven) an instrument of louche debauchery rather than frenetic jazz. There was a moment of stasis, then a rich romantic flow, with denser orchestral textures and added piano. The texture thinned out, with excellent solos from Raven, Clive Williamson (piano), Peter Dixon (cello) and Steven Burnard (viola). The music was constantly reaching for something (love?). In this performance, it felt angular yet romantic, dissonant yet tonal, decadent but beautiful, unsettling yet calm.
Cassandra Miller’s viola concerto, I cannot love without trembling is already an enormous success. Since its premiere three years ago, it has been performed a further 14 times, with two more performances scheduled for May 2026. The concerto takes its title from a quotation from the French philosopher, Simone Weil (1909-1943), in a letter she wrote to another French philosopher, Gustave Thibon,
“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling”
Quotation from Weil’s Gravity and Grace, published posthumously by Gustave Thibon
The concerto has four movements or verses with a closing cadenza, each part taking its name from a Weil quotation, and it runs without a break. Weil’s Gravity and Grace describes what separates us and what brings us together, based on the Platonic concept of μεταξύ (‘metaxu’ or ‘metaxy’ meaning ‘between’). Miller heard recordings of the violinist Alexis Zoumbas who left the northern mountains of Greece in the early nineteenth century to go to New York. According to the Mississippi records website,
“Zoumbas had the rare gift of expressing emotion clearly and urgently through his instrument, and his violin feels like an extension of his heart, soul, and the deep musical history of his faraway home in Epirus”
Alexis Zoumbas • Epirotiko Moiroloi from American Museum of Paramusicology
Zoumbas’ improvisations evoke a feeling of Ξενατία (Xenatia), Greek for a ‘catastrophic longing for home’, based on Mοιρολόϊ (moiroloi), Greek mourning songs. Miller internalised Zoumbas’ moiroloi recording by singing along over and over again, creating a sacred ritual based on deep meditation. Miller describes this as ‘automatic singing’, which seems akin to automatic writing.
The result is a spellbinding piece of music in which the audience shares the composer’s dreams and rituals and joins her in the intense sense of mourning and lamentation it conveys. Even the soloist is invited to share this meditative state – at one point the score instructs the violist to play ‘with eyes closed.’ The orchestra is invited to join the collective dreaming, often playing sotto voce, surrounding the soloist with shimmering, muted soundscapes. As Miller says,
“Within Zoumbas’ plaintive song, I sought a metaphysical space in which to dream – a space of separation-connection-absence-presence – in the hope to lament and to dream together in this hall tonight.“
On Saturday, the piece began with murmuring percussion and very high harmonics from Lawrence Power’s viola. He played a rising melody which fractured before establishing itself. We immediately entered a remarkable and unique sound world, as Power played music that trembled, inward-looking, contemplative and keening. The sound was lonely, nostalgic, a voice crying out in the wilderness, lamenting in the depths of sorrow. The cellos joined him from the depths, echoing his sorrow.
A single flute note rang out like a call in the darkest night. The viola joined an octave above, with shimmering accompaniment. The viola sounded like a voice wailing and lamenting, and the orchestra shared the viola’s grief. In the third movement, the viola part was more strenuous, with glowing brass and fluttering woodwind. Trumpets suddenly appeared, playing a robust, anguished theme. The viola was riven with emotion, then dropped out completely. There was a stunning section where the viola obsessively plucked a single note and played a melancholy melody, the bass drum rumbling ominously below. The strings crept in with an evocative sweep, and the harp picked up the viola’s repeated note, which then passed to tubular bells, like a beating heart.
As Power moved towards his final cadenza, a florid piccolo (Jennifer Hutchinson) made a lively announcement. Bowed percussion and bells, with gently-strummed strings, took us to a world beyond the stars. The viola finally took flight with superb virtuosity, playing very fast, and lower down the fingerboard. Power raised his bow above his head as the orchestra gradually died away. A stunning ending to a stunning piece.
For the second time this week, the composer came on to take her applause at the Bridgewater Hall (the first time being when Unsuk Chin came on to acknowledge applause for Le Chant des Enfants des Étoiles performed by the Hallé orchestra and choirs).
Viola Player Lawrence Power, Conductor Ludovic Morlot and Members of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Credit: Chris Payne
The second half of the concert was devoted to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, performed on Saturday, not in any of the composer’s orchestral suites, but in a sequence of extracts that broadly told the whole story of the ballet, in four sections.
The music began with a romantic sweep, played with gorgeous ensemble, the lilting strings unaware of the tragedy to come. The orchestra, particularly the bassoons, played the lively, characterful dance of the servants with great joy.
The Young Juliet perfectly captured Juliet’s changing moods, with whimsical, scurrying violins, perfectly controlled, and more expansive playing to represent her contemplative moods. The Dance of the Knights (now known as the theme tune for The Apprentice and also used to introduce Sunderland AFC at the Stadium of Light) raised a smile and a scattering of applause at the end. The players revelled in the descriptive orchestration. The romantic, yearning theme of Juliet on the balcony was magical, with a moment of piety from the organ solo. Ardent strings announced Romeo’s entrance, and the whole orchestra reached for the stars as the lovers danced together.
Fizzing, frenzied themes introduced the fight scenes in the marketplace, distorting the Knights’ theme. A brass chorale sounded a note of threat. The orchestra played with incredible precision as they reached a huge, disturbing climax. Surging, muted horns announced Mercutio’s death, who retained his sense of irony to the end, like a character from Shostakovich’s music. There was an incredibly descriptive moment in the cellos as he fought for his breath, combining precision and emotion. The fierce pitched battle between Romeo and Mercutio was played at heart-racing speed, with savagely loud timpani marking Mercutio’s death.
Stunning pizzicato strings and vengeful brass announced the Capulets intent to avenge Mercutio’s death, with a breathtakingly discordant final chord. An anguished string lament, right at the top of the violins’ range, like some of the viola solos in the Miller piece, as Juliet’s funeral took place. This was genuinely moving, even though we knew she was still alive. Romeo entered, and we shared his regret as the poison took hold and the music sank into darkness. Juliet awoke with a brass chorale as she saw her young lover lying dead. She briefly recalled her joy in sorrow. In a gentle, moving climax, with stunning woodwind harmonies, she stabbed herself. As with any superb performance of a Shakespearean tragedy, we were left emotionally wrung out, with a purging feeling of catharsis.
Conductor Ludovic Morlot and Members of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Credit Chris Payne
Repertoire
Alban Berg Lulu Suite – Rondo Cassandra Miller I cannot love without trembling (Viola Concerto) Sergey Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet – The market place – introduction and morning dance (Nos. 1 & 4); At the Capulets’ house – Juliet’s bedroom , the ballroom and the balcony (Nos. 10, 13, 19-21); The market place – Tybalt kills Mercutio and Romeo kills Tybalt (Nos. 32-36); Juliet’s bedroom, the tomb – her funeral and death (Nos. 37, 51 -52)
Performers
Lawrence Power viola BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Ludovic Morlot conductor
The concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Classical Live on Wednesday 25 March. It will be available for 30 days after broadcast via BBC Sounds.
Read on…
The BBC Philharmonic playing Cassandra Miller’s I cannot love without trembling at the BBC Proms in 2024
In an article in The Guardian, Tom Service described the final page of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony as ‘one of the most famously death-haunted places in orchestral music’. As he pointed out, the final bar is even marked ‘esterbend’ (dying or dying away). There are other references to death scattered all over the symphony. Mahler wrote ‘Leb’ wohl’ (farewell) above a motif in the first movement in the draft score. This motif recalls ‘Der Abschied’ (The Farewell) from Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), written around the same time as the symphony. The composer Alban Berg wrote, ‘The entire [first] movement is based on a presentiment of death’, and the symphony’s first conductor Bruno Walter wrote the word ‘farewell’ could have been written ‘at the head of the Ninth.’ The final movement quotes music from Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children).
Tom Service also wrote that Leonard Bernstein, and many other conductors and listeners, saw the symphony as representing a ‘whole suite of deaths.’ This was Mahler’s last completed symphony. He was aware that Beethoven and Bruckner had died after writing their ninth symphonies, and created a superstition later called the curse of the ninth. He thought he had cheated it by renaming his true ninth symphony Das Lied von der Erde. He had also lost his four-year-old daughter Maria, who died in 1907 of scarlet fever. He had been diagnosed with an incurable heart condition in the same year, which probably led to his early death at the age of 50 in 1911. He failed to hear his Ninth Symphony, which he completed in 1910, but was not premiered until 1912. Service also refers to the death of tonality, which Mahler’s late work certainly prefigures, and also the ‘death throes of the figure of artist as hero in European culture.’
But having skilfully set up the case for the prosecution, Service comes to the symphony’s defence as a life-affirming work despite all the difficulties Mahler was suffering, or perhaps because of them. Those looking for musical clues should consider that the first movement’s sighing, falling theme that provides so much of the material of the symphony is based on a waltz by Johann Strauss, with the delightfully unambiguous title ‘Enjoy Life.’ Jo Kirkbride, in her programme note, whilst acknowledging the symphony is about death, is on the same side as Service, pointing to a letter Mahler wrote to Bruno Walter in 1909 in which he said,
‘I have more thirst for life than ever, and find the “habits of existence” sweeter than ever.’
The Israeli-American conductor Yoel Gamzou, who conducted the BBC Philharmonic on Saturday, is known as a Mahler specialist. He was inspired to become a conductor as a boy when he heard Mahler’s music. He studied privately with the great Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, who recorded Mahler’s Ninth in 1994. In 2006, Gamzou founded his own International Mahler Orchestra. A composer as well as a conductor, in 2010, he achieved something Mahler himself never did – the completion of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. The depth of his knowledge was revealed by his ability to draw out incredible detail from the orchestra, who played superbly for him on Saturday. His conducting was expressive, dramatic, and demonstrative, with large and passionate gestures, often pointing imperiously at individual players or sections, and moving lithely on the podium. So it was remarkable that at the end of the final movement his gestures became more and more subtle and delicate. He held the orchestra – and a rapt audience – in his hands. He very deliberately closed his score at the end, holding everyone in the hall in reverential silence for what seemed like an age.
So what was Gamzou’s view of the symphony? In the first movement, he brought out the piece’s drama, with immense climaxes and easily drew out all the densely complex lines. There was occasional respite from the opaque strands of sound, even optimism and joy, and a lovely ending, suggesting a bucolic, gentle scene.
Mahler’s title for the second movement is very specific, ‘Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb’ (In the tempo of an easy-going country waltz. Somewhat clumsy and very rough). The movement is based on the Ländler, a European folk dance of which Mahler was particularly fond. In a memorable phrase, Robert Philip described how three versions of the dance try to establish themselves simultaneously, ‘as if a drunk is assailed by conflicting images of the dancers.’ Gamzou achieved the feat of bringing out the coarseness of the music, but paradoxically with great precision. At the end of the movement, there was a fiercely dramatic, dark section of what felt like sarcastic joy, which could have come from a symphony with Shostakovich, who owed a debt to Mahler. The movement fell away in sadness, as if the folk dancers, now defeated, were disappearing from the stage.
The music of Shostakovich was prefigured even more obviously in the third movement, which Mahler described as a ‘Rondo-Burleske’. In case that hinted at excess jolliness, he also marked it ‘Sehr trotzig’ (Very defiant). Gamzou brought out all the sarcasm of the movement with a fiercely frenetic opening, with a theme that soon got lost in a morass of sound. He danced on the podium, recalling another conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, the great Yan Pascal Tortelier. The movement was at once life-affirming and troubling. The trumpet solo, which provides one of the musical fragments on which the final movement is based, provided a glimpse of serenity, before angular, Shostakovichian woodwinds destroyed the mood. Depending on which theory you follow, the movement could be a celebration of life’s visceral, thrilling, but unsettling nature, or a sarcastic dismissal of a life that is shortly to be left behind.
As Service wrote, an essential clue to a conductor’s interpretation is their approach to the final movement, which he wittily described as ‘cataclysmically slow.’ Mahler’s description is clear. ‘Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend’(Very slow and even held back). Bruno Walter’s 1938 recording lasted just over 18 minutes, whereas Bernstein stretched the movement to 30 minutes. Gamzou’s performance lasted 28 minutes, putting him firmly at the Bernstein end of things, and perhaps emphasising the movement’s valedictory nature. Equally, the movement can be seen as a hymn to life, possibly highlighted by the sometimes gut-wrenching intensity of the orchestra’s stunning playing. Even the musical quotation from Kindertotenlieder is ambiguous. The song’s words describe how, ‘Im Sonnenschein der Tag ist schön’ (In the sunlight, the day is beautiful). We could take this at face value, describing the subtle joy that life brings, or we could remember that in the original song, the words describe how the protagonist thinks that the children have merely run ahead into the sunshine during a summer walk, and that they will appear around the next corner, a terrible affirmation of the inevitability of death.
Whatever your interpretation is of the final movement – and the symphony as a whole – the playing at the end was profoundly moving. There was a lovely portamento from the strings as if they could not let go of the notes. After a gorgeous cello solo, the strings crept back in. There was a beautifully-controlled pianissimo with a never-ending melody, and one last rousing of the second violin theme before the orchestra fell into silence.
Repertoire
Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 9 in D major
Performers
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Yoel Gamzou Conductor
Sources
Tom Service, Symphony Guide: Mahler’s Ninth (The Guardian 29 July 2014) Jo Kirkbride Programme Note for BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Robert Philip, The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music (Yale University Press, Kindle Edition)
This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 19.30 on Tuesday 8 July and will be available for 30 days after broadcast on BBC Sounds
A stunning performance of Beethoven’s final piano concerto by Paul Lewis, bookended by two Nordic symphonies
John Storgårds, Paul Lewis and members of the BBC Philharmonic. Image copyright Chris Payne
Last Saturday’s concert by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra was going to feature music by three Nordic composers: the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, the Danish composer Per Nørgård and the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, all conducted by the Finnish conductor John Storgårds. In the event, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor was replaced by Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, also known as the ‘Emperor’.
The concert began with Symphony No. 8 by the Danish composer Per Nørgård. It was commissioned by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and is dedicated to the Orchestra and to conductor John Storgårds. Another post on this Blog, a review of the Bass Communion album, Ghosts on Magnetic Tape, addresses what constitutes music. The symphony presented a similar challenge, which could defeat listeners hearing it for the first time, offering music that appears tonal but often slips away from the listener’s grasp. In his very helpful programme note, Stephen Johnson addressed this issue,
‘The profusion of sounds, all vying for attention, may seem bewildering. So too might the music’s tendency to invoke traditional tonal harmonies, then immediately throw them out of focus.’
Johnson also drew an astute connection with the symphonic works of Sibelius, which the composer described as flowing ‘like a river.’ Nørgård’s symphony has a constant flow of glittering themes, repeatedly fractured but driven by an inner momentum. Armed with this knowledge, rather than searching for conventional development of symphonic themes, the listener can make sense of the piece and enjoy a fascinating journey.
It helped that the BBC Philharmonic’s performance, conducted by the symphony’s dedicatee, John Storgårds, with ferocious concentration, was crystalline and magical, an invigorating investigation into orchestral timbre. The first movement began mysteriously, like a wood at night. Rasping brass led to Bernard Herrmann-like strings that shimmered with an evil glint. An endless piano tune was passed around the orchestra, including percussion. Storgårds stepped back in a ‘senza misura’ section, a free section without a regular beat, which felt like the chiming of demented clocks. A solo violin reverberated like a siren, and the music unravelled itself, bringing the movement to an uneasy end.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S. Eliot
The second movement felt as if it had been written in a fever dream, like film music where the page had been smudged. Nervous strings and strident brass headed towards an apotheosis but collapsed and fell away. There was a mass of sound, a dense adagio with filigree decoration. A slow theme was picked out by the strings but undermined by restless percussion, before a brief and uncertain resolution. The final movement began with the arid sound of the rim of a side drum being struck, and sarcastic military brass. The playing throughout was virtuosic, as rising themes that never resolved appeared from a turbulent miasma of sound. Yet, there were occasional moments of glittering joy and clarity. The strangely rhapsodic ending brought a moment of stasis with an unsettling cello solo. The performance brought to mind T.S. Eliot’s phrase, ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’ – Nørgård’s symphony had the same effect.
Paul Lewis, John Storgårds and members of the BBC Philharmonic. Image copyright Chris Payne
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 brought no such epistemological agonies; it’s well enough known that the interest for the listener lies in the performance rather than trying to unravel the mysteries of the music itself. In his programme note, Barry Cooper referred to the concerto’s nickname, the ‘Emperor’, which describes the ‘grand, majestic character’ of the piece. The piano soloist, Paul Lewis, opened the first movement, following the initial orchestral chords, playing with mesmerising poise and grace, at a faster pace than some interpretations. While Lewis waited patiently, the orchestra played resolutely, fiercely rhythmic, then dancing elegantly. He picked up the theme with a shimmering upward piano run, decorating the theme, then providing a romantic variation. A more robust passage gave way to a stunning syncopated section with gentle rubato. The precision of Lewis’ left hand was revealed in a descending theme, with a bell-like, ringing touch in the right hand. An exuberant symphonic section was decorated by sparkling piano – a moment of lucid joy. The movement concluded with a virtuosic cadenza from Lewis, his hands chasing each other across the keyboard, producing a twinkling sound reminiscent of a glass harmonica.
The second and third movements merged to form a section that was as long as the entire first movement. Some audience members jumped as the piano suddenly transitioned from one movement to the next without warning. Again, the highlight was Lewis’ playing, ably supported by the orchestra, who began the second movement in contemplative mood, with deeply resonating basses and stunning ensemble. Lewis matched their tender playing with rapt contemplation, picking out each note with beautiful evenness. There was a heart-stopping extended section in which Lewis was accompanied by the woodwind. There were times when his playing exhibited a Mozartian lightness, as well as a Beethovenian robustness. Lewis made this colossus of a piece light and delicate, shot through with subtle joy. He was justly celebrated at the end with rapturous applause and ecstatic shouts.
The second half of the concert featured the second Nordic symphony of the evening, Sibelius’s third. An oft-quoted conversation between Sibelius and another great symphonist, Gustav Mahler, ended with the latter saying that the symphony should be like the world, ‘It must embrace everything.’ As Katy Hamilton pointed out in her programme note, it’s less often remembered that Mahler’s comment was in reply to Sibelius’ comment, made just after he completed his Third Symphony, that a symphony should be marked by its ‘severity of style and the profound logic that created an inner connection between all the motifs.’
Despite Sibelius’ avowed debt to the formal traditions of previous symphonists such as Mozart, Haydn and Mozart, the symphony demonstrates, according to Robert Philip, that,
Sibelius’s harmonic language is becoming more wayward, and his characteristic fragmentation of ideas makes large swathes of the symphony elusive until you get to know it – and even then, you have to accept that elusiveness is part of the point.
The symphony began with a robust bass tune, followed by a folky melody in the woodwinds, accompanied by swirling strings; we were immediately immersed in Sibelius’ distinctive sound world, rather than the sound of the earlier symphonists, although as Robert Philip points out the use of folk music is a feature of Mahler’s symphonies. Storgårds beautifully controlled the spiralling momentum of the opening. A moment of chromatic unease, marked by scurrying flutes, gave way to a surprising break in momentum. The orchestra played with a warm, generous sound as Storgårds urged them on to a climax. The folk tune returned, then the music dissolved into ambiguity. There was rich brass and perfect ensemble in the strings. The movement ended with its final noble statements and a pleasing plagal (‘amen’) cadence.
John Storgårds and members of the BBC Philharmonic Image copyright Chris Payne
The second movement began with an open fifth on the horns, then a stately, lilting dance on woodwind, beautifully played with lovely poise. One of the themes was an intriguing pre-echo of the vocal section in the second movement of Jon Lord’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra (1969). A majestically sorrowful melody from the cellos was followed by playful pizzicato, passing through different keys and gradually broadening out into the earlier theme. The third movement passed from a scherzo-like opening to a grand finale. Again, there were pre-echoes of later Sibelius, and a hymn-like tune emerged that was strongly reminiscent of the melody from Finlandia (1899), which later became the Finlandia Hymn, an important anthem in Storgårds’ native country. At the end of the piece, there was lengthy applause, and Storgårds went into the orchestra to thank individual sections, including the double basses, who were slightly out of reach. Returning to the front of the stage, he bowed to thank the audience, his hand on his heart, as if to acknowledge the emotional impact that the symphony had on him.
Repertoire Per Nørgård Symphony No. 8 Ludwig van Beethoven Piano Concerto No.5, ‘Emperor’ Jean Sibelius Symphony No 3 in C major
Performers BBC Philharmonic Orchestra John Storgårds conductor Paul Lewis piano
Sources BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes T.S. Eliot, Dante (Faber, 1929) Robert Philip, The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music (Yale University Press, Kindle Edition)
The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday 1 April at 19.30 and will be available on BBC Sounds for 30 days after that.
In the first half of Saturday evening’s concert, we were in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, a phrase coined by poet William Blake and made famous by Hubert Parry in Jerusalem, which he wrote in 1916 during WWI. The two featured English works had strong links to WWI, although neither was directly inspired by the war.
George Butterworth wrote his orchestral rhapsody A Shropshire Lad in 1911 as an epilogue to his song cycle for voice and piano, A Shropshire Lad. His aim was ‘to express the home thoughts of the exiled Lad’, the protagonist of the poems written by AE Housman in 1896. Housman’s poems are preoccupied with early death in war and so became particularly poignant and relevant during WWI. Tragically, Butterworth was killed in action on the Somme in 1916.
Edward Elgar wrote his Cello Concerto, his last major work, just after WWI. In his own catalogue of his works, he wrote ‘Finis. RIP.’ to mark the end of his composing career. A few months after the premiere, his wife Alice sadly died and with her his inspiration to write music, even though he survived her for 14 years.
Although not explicitly written in response to WWI, the concerto is perfused with melancholy and nostalgia. As the cellist Steven Isserlis wrote:
The concerto is a poem of regret, a searching elegy to the whole world—both inner and outer—that had been swept away by the horrors of the Great War.
Steven Isserlis (Hyperion Records)
Butterworth’s orchestral lament for loss is primarily based on a theme from Housman’s poem Loveliest of Trees, which was voted one of the nation’s 100 favourite poems in a BBC poll. It has been set to music over 60 times. The poem isn’t about war – the protagonist is 20 years old and anticipates living another 50 years to make up his ‘threescore years and ten’ (the Biblical lifespan of 70 years). The message is that the cherry blossom should be enjoyed while you can, in case life is cut short: carpe diem. The piece ends with a brief instrumental quotation from another of Housman’s Shropshire Lad poems – from the Bredon Hill and Other Songs cycle – With Rue my Heart is Laden, This laments the loss of ‘golden friends I had’. The poem makes it clear later that the friends have died, although again not in war,
By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid; The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade.
On Saturday evening, Butterworth’s piece began with a moment of stasis, long held notes in the lower strings, and a conversation between the woodwind and violas. John Bradbury on clarinet provided the opening statement of the ‘cherry’ theme, which was then passed around the orchestra. One of the joys of this arrangement is hearing the theme of the original theme repeated with varied harmonies and orchestration, sometimes sounding like Debussy, and elsewhere like Vaughan Williams. When the strings took up the theme it repeated itself with romantic sweeps, glowing like a film score.
The moving final section spread the theme across various solo instruments, with solo instruments – violin, viola and clarinet, spellbinding violas, and a glistening orchestral swell. The final, brief flute solo was on the words ‘With rue my heart is laden’. Conductor John Storgårds left a long silence at the end while we contemplated the loss of Housman’s golden friends.
The soloist in Elgar’s Cello Concerto was the young cellist Senja Rummukainen. She first came to public attention in her home country of Finland when she won the Turku Cello Competition ten years ago. She was then a finalist in the International Tchaikovsky Competition.
Many audience members would have been familiar with the Cello Concerto through the famous recording made sixty years ago by Jacqueline Du Pré with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli. Sarah Kirkup wrote in Gramophone,
Everyone who saw du Pré play was caught up in the passion she conveyed, even though her wild physical movements were not to everyone’s taste. Perhaps English critics at the time weren’t used to such overt displays of emotion.
From the opening bars, it was evident that Rummukainen’s approach would differ from Du Pré’s. This was an inward, contemplative, quietly intense but equally passionate reading, slower than some other performances, darkly melancholic – expressing the piece, in the words of cellist Steven Isserlis as a ‘poem of regret.’ Isserlis’ description of the poem of the opening as a ‘bold flourish’ and ‘heroic’ didn’t apply here. The introspective cello line was soon joined by meditative woodwind and pensive strings.
Throughout the concerto, Rummukainen quietly dominated the orchestra with a golden thread that cut through orchestral textures. She gave the concerto a valedictory, nostalgic feel, sometimes sounding like a lone voice crying out. Even when the orchestra was let off the leash, it felt stately rather than bombastic. She played with a lovely legato, a continuous line like the best singers. Her pianissimos were spellbinding , profoundly moving, inviting the audience to hold their breath with her.
That’s not to say that her performance was all dark. Her pizzicato playing was whimsical and subtle. At one point, her quicksilver playing, beautifully articulated, was playful, almost jolly. Later, she joined a dance with the orchestra, finally allowing herself to let go a little. Towards the end, she played faster than it’s often performed usual, and conductor John Storgårds brought out the richness of Elgar’s orchestration, with majestic lower strings and rasping brass. This was a stunning interpretation.
Rummukainen, who seemed genuinely pleased to be taking part, returned to the stage to play an encore, a Theme and Variations for solo cello by her compatriot Jean Sibelius. The combination of melancholy and lively music perfectly matched the tone of the Elgar. Rummukainen was virtuosic but not showy, exhibiting the full range of techniques with double-stopping, pizzicato and harmonics, drawing the listener in with a gorgeous tone. She is an exceptional talent.
The second half took us to the dying embers of the Russian Empire and the establishment of the Soviet Union. At the same time as Butterworth was writing his celebration of Englishness, Stravinsky drew on music by Rimsky-Korsakov and Russian folktales to create The Firebird for the 1910-11 season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Ironically, considering that the work has become standard repertoire, Stravinsky was the fourth choice of composer after Alexander Tcherepnin, Anatoly Lyadov and Alexander Glazunov had all been approached.
Stravinsky was praised at the time for the nationalist flavour of his music. One critic said he was the only composer ‘who has achieved more than mere attempts to promote Russia’s true musical spirit and style.’ The composer Sergey Rachmaninov is reported to have said, ‘Great God! What a work of genius this is! This is true Russia!’ Stravinsky left Russia at the start of WWI, and the October Revolution in 1917 left him unable to return to his homeland.
The effect of the October Revolution on Shostakovich was very different. He was only 11 years old in 1917. In 1927, he was commissioned by the Propaganda Department of the State Music Publishing House in the Soviet Union to write a piece celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Revolution, including a choral finale called Dedication to October with words by the ‘proletarian’ poet Alexander Bezymensky, an enthusiastic member of the Bolshevik party.
Lenin speaks to the public during the 1917 revolution. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Although Shostakovich embraced this opportunity to write a work which would become his Second Symphony, in private he agonised over the words, which were a hymn of praise for Lenin, ‘Oh, Lenin! You forged freedom through suffering/You forged freedom from our toil-hardened hands.’ He wrote that the text was ‘repulsive’ and reportedly told the musicologist Boleslav Yavorsky, ‘I’m composing with great difficulty. The Words!!!’ The musicologist Solomon Volkov wrote of the choral section in his 2004 book on the composer, ‘One is tempted simply to cut it off with a pair of scissors.’
The conductor Vasily Petrenko, in his sleeve notes for his complete recording of the Shostakovich symphonies on Naxos with the RLPO wrote,
The second symphony, while not a great work, is for me a genuine, brave response to a commission. He’s showing that he’s learned to write for a larger orchestra and for chorus.
With all the above in mind, it was a relief that the BBC Philharmonic played the symphony so well, convincing sceptics that this is indeed a symphony worth hearing. Petrenko described the first, instrumental, section of the work as, ‘a crazy laboratory of the grotesque in music’, and the orchestra perfectly brought out the avant-garde, modernist nature of the score, which in parts sounded as if it was written yesterday.
The piece began with what sounded like a representation of chaos, mysterious and intense like the Elgar but in a very different way; the Biblical phrase ‘darkness on the face of the deep’ came to mind. After an evocative brass theme, the piece sank into chaos again before a stunning climax and a sudden, unexpected major chord. A robustly romantic violin solo, and woodwind solos, over a low drone, presaged the composer’s later style. The orchestra played with vigorous passion and precision, reaching a phantasmagoric climax, driven by a wild side drum. There was a brief threat of Mahlerian glory (the Phil performed Shostakovich’s Mahler-influenced Fourth Symphony at the Proms last July). But then the music unravelled itself with a jazzy clarinet solo and a spiky tune like the later Shostakovich.
The Second Symphony was written nearly ten years before Stalin’s famous denunciation of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. After this, the composer spent the rest of his life worrying about persecution. In his 2016 novel, The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes memorably describes the composer standing by the lift in his apartment block, bag packed, waiting to be taken away. But the young Shostakovich obviously thought he could get away with writing avant-garde music (Muddle Instead of Music) as long as he satisfied the Party faithful. Conveniently, he included a noisy siren to announce the choral section and wake Party officials in time for the best bit.
The CBSO Chorus, who had travelled all the way from Birmingham for six minutes of glory, made the most of it. Their superb delivery of the choral section was passionate, fervent, committed and utterly convincing. Lenin and his officials would have been very pleased. The choir sang ecstatically, clearly enjoying themselves, so excited that (as the score demands) they were shouting joyfully at the end. It was a stunning performance, which drew well-deserved enthusiastic applause.
Shostakovich’s Second Symphony has only been performed once in the BBC Proms. In contrast, The Firebird has been performed nearly 70 times at the Proms. Stravinsky wrote three different suites of music from his original ballet The Firebird, published in 1910, 1919 and 1945. The BBC Philharmonic played the 1945 version on Saturday. In 1945 Stravinsky substantially reorchestrated the suite and re-ordered it to allow him to renew the copyright in the US. He sold the rights to the Leeds Music Corporation. He ended up suing them for allegedly producing a jukebox arrangement of one of the dance pieces from the work and stating that the arrangement was Stravinsky’s. A former law student, the composer lost his case for $250,000 in damages.
The 1945 version is less often performed than the 1910 and 1919 suites, so it was fascinating to hear it on Saturday. It’s less lush than the original ballet, and conductor John Storgårds superbly brought out all the details in the 1945 score. It felt more like a tone poem than a ballet, with at times a chamber orchestra clarity. It began with low basses, like the Shostakovich, mysterious but clear, the distinctive theme played with great assurance, beautifully paced.
The ensemble in the strings was stunning, lively, and playful when needed. The orchestra played romantically, casting back to the style of Rimsky-Korsakov when required, but also at times with a spikiness that looked forward to Petrushka, performed by the BBC Philharmonic earlier this season. The woodwind section was superb throughout.
After a very short break, there was an explosion of percussion and brass, like a section from The Rite of Spring, delivered with stunning precision. Passionate swirling strings and virtuosic playing from Paul Patrick on glockenspiel (one of the soloists in Des canyons aux étoiles… in December) brought a visceral thrill. Suddenly, a mysterious vista opened, a moment of revelation, leading to a sense of inevitability in the music, with a gorgeous bassoon theme and shimmering strings. The horn solo, by the excellent Rebecca Levis, led to a tremendous climax as the music built inexorably with an incredible crescendo. The performance ended with a series of precise, almost clipped chords, followed by huge applause.
One of the joys of hearing the BBC Philharmonic live at present is the quality of the individual musicianship within the sections, particularly the woodwind, and the audience reacted with delight as John Storgårds brought them to their feet. There was a lovely moment when percussionist Geraint Daniel, retiring after a career lasting over 40 years, was given a large bunch of flowers to celebrate his final Bridgewater Hall concert with the orchestra.
Programme
George Butterworth Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad Edward Elgar Cello Concerto in E minor Dmitry Shostakovich Symphony No 2 in B major ‘To October’ Igor Stravinsky The Firebird – suite (1945 version)
Performers
BBC Philharmonic John Storgårds conductor Senja Rummukainen cello City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Chorus
Sources
Isserlis, Steven Cello Notes to his recording of Elgar’s Concerto in E minor, Op 85 (Hyperion Records 2016) Kirkup, Sarah, Jacqueline du Pré and Elgar’s Cello Concerto (Gramophone 25 May 2021) Nguyen, Clara, The Copyright of Spring: Igor Stravinsky and U.S. LawHarvard Undergraduate Law Review (Spring 2020) Petrenko, Vasily Notes to SHOSTAKOVICH, D.: Symphonies (Complete) (Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, Petrenko) (Naxos) BBC Proms performance archive
The concert with be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 19.30 on Monday 3 February, and will available on BBC Sounds for 30 days
The French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992) was commissioned by the American arts patron Alice Tully in 1971 to write a piece for chamber orchestra to celebrate the bicentenary of the American Declaration of Independence in 1976. Des canyons aux étoiles… (From the Canyons to the Stars) was premiered in 1974 at Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center in New York. Last Thursday’s concert by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under Ludovic Morlot was the fiftieth anniversary, almost to the day, of the world premiere.
Messiaen wrote the piece for unusual forces – plenty of woodwind, brass and percussion, but only six violins, three violas, three cellos and one double bass. The percussion section, made up of five players, includes a wind machine, several gongs, crotales and tumba – plus an instrument invented by Messiaen, a geophone. Not to be confused with the scientific instrument of the same name, Messiaen’s instrument is also called the ocean drum. It consists of a metal drum filled with lead pellets, which are swirled around horizontally. The piece also features four soloists – on Thursday, they were Steven Osborne (piano), Tim Williams (glockenspiel), and Martin Owen (horn). Paul Patrick played xylorimba, which despite its name is not a hybrid of a xylophone and a marimba but more like an extended xylophone.
Messiaen had long been inspired to write music about birds and their surrounding habitat, diligently notated their song in the wild. In the 50s, he wrote Le Merle noir (Blackbird) for solo piano and Catalogue d’oiseaux (Catalogue of birds) for solo piano. He described birds as ‘the greatest musicians’ on earth. He was also inspired by landscape – in Spring 1972, he and his wife Yvonne Loriod visited the canyons of Utah, which he said was ‘the grandest and most beautiful marvels of the world’. He described Bryce Canyon as ‘the most beautiful thing in the United States’, devoting a whole movement of Des canyons aux étoiles… to describing its wonders. Another movement is inspired by the majestic landscapes of Zion Park, and a third by the vast natural amphitheatre of Cedar Breaks National Monument. Other movements are inspired by specific birds whose songs he notated in Utah and elsewhere around the world.
At over 90 minutes without a break, Des canyons aux étoiles… represents a challenge not just to performers but to audiences; as Richard Steinitz wrote, ‘Can this monumental cycle of meditations on the majesty of God’s creation really hold our interest over twelve movements and one-and-a-half hours of playing time?’ The answer last Thursday was a resounding ‘yes’; the BBC Philharmonic and soloists brought the score to compelling life in a way which even the best studio recording will inevitably struggle to do. It was partly observing the sheer concentration and physical effort exerted by the performers. Steven Osborne, in particular, was stunningly visceral, expressing the music through his whole body, not just his hands. He revealed on social media that he had to tape up his left hand to prevent sudden nerve pain while playing Messiaen, who ‘probably needs more noise than any other I play.’ Horn soloist Martin Owen, who usually sits in the middle of the BBC Symphony Orchestra as Principal Horn, left his seat in the orchestra and stood at the front of the stage to play his sixth-movement solo, sometimes stopping (as marked by Messiaen) as if to challenge the audience, and swaying as he played half-notes. Watching the wide range of percussion, including the enormous wind machine and the intriguing geophone, was also fascinating.
Olivier Messiaen in 1986. Source: Dutch National Archives/Wikimedia Commons
But to return to the structure of the piece, it’s essential to bear in mind that, as David Hill wrote in the introduction to The Messiaen Companion,
“Faith, as Messiaen repeatedly emphasised, was his sole reason for composing… Even the structure of his music seems permeated by his faith…“
Messiaen was a Catholic, but his approach to faith was very different from the thrilling drama of the film Conclave (reviewed by Wendy Ide in The Guardian), in which candidates for the papacy are seen as locked in an all-too-human power struggle, earth-bound in their ambition and their doubts; unlike Messiaen who gazed up to the stars with child-like wonder and unshakeable faith in God. As Hill wrote, we shouldn’t expect Messiaen’s music to develop or to explore theological arguments about his faith. As Steinitz wrote, there is no ‘no hint of the pain of Gerontius’s blinding encounter with the absolute perfection of God [in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius], no shadow of concern that the deity should allow agony as well as joy in his creation.’ Instead, to use Steinitz’s phrase, Messiaen’s music, like Bach’s in pieces like his Mass in B Minor, displays ‘radiance, passion and conviction.’ The joy of listening to Des canyons aux étoiles… lies in each movement’s fantastic variety of instrumental colour and techniques rather than the spiritual journey described by the Dream of Gerontius.
Music, an art which exists in the here-and-now, in measured time,… is used by Messiaen to convey mysteries which lie beyond time… [He] stands apart from the Western tradition (since the Renaissance at least) in which musical events are ordered into a directional sequence or narrative. Messiaen’s music accumulates but it does not develop (in the accepted sense) or argue. In part this is because Messiaen’s acceptance of faith is so complete he is simply not concerned with the strains and tensions which are the stuff of drama in music.
Peter Hill, The Messiaen Companion
Part 1: 1 Le désert (The desert) 2 Les orioles (The orioles) 3 Ce qui est écrit sur les étoiles (What is written in the stars) 4 Le Cossyphe d’Heuglin (The white-browed robin-chat) for solo piano 5 Cedar Breaks et le don de crainte (Cedar Breaks and the gift of awe)
The opening movement is designed to cleanse the mind in preparation for the religious meditations of the rest of the work. In Messiaen’s words in his Preface, the desert is a
‘symbol for the emptiness of the soul which allows it to perceive the inner conversation of the Spirit.’
It began with an incantatory horn call, played with a lovely tone from Martin Owen. The desert’s humid aridity was perfectly captured by Jennifer Hutchison on piccolo, only just within the threshold of human hearing, and by bowed antique percussion (crotales). The desert was also evoked by the otherworldly sound of the wind machine, describing both spiritual emptiness and the wind in the barren landscape of the desert. The piccolo also described the song of a specific bird, the lark of the Sahara desert.
The second movement is based on the song of another bird transcribed by Messiaen, the oriole, a type of blackbird with black and orange or yellow plumage. Messiaen saw birds as evoking the voice of God, and Steven Osborne’s playing was suitably devotional, with a gorgeously delicate touch and heart-stopping moments of subtlety. As in his opera Saint François d’Assise (St Francis of Assisi), written in the late ‘70s shortly after Des Canyons, immensely complex harmonies were resolved with consonant chords of comfort, representing the simplicity of Messiaen’s religious faith. The movement also featured virtuosic playing from Paul Patrick on xylorimba.
The third movement is the first one to feature the ‘stars’ of Descanyons aux étoiles… Messiaen wrote that standing at the bottom of a canyon one inevitably looks up at the stars, ‘one progresses from the deepest bowels of the earth and ascends towards the stars’.
What is ‘written in the stars’ is the words ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’ which come from the Biblical Book of Daniel. In the story of the feast of King Belshazzar (see below) the fateful words were written on the wall, leading to the expression ‘the writing on the wall’, which suggests something unpleasant is about to happen. Musical depictions of the feast date back to the 12th-century Play of Daniel, followed by Handel’s oratorio Belshazzar (1744). The most famous 20th century example is William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1931), which has been performed at the BBC Proms no fewer than 35 times.
Walton’s version includes a moment of high drama when the the choir and soloist sing the words of warning, but Messiaen uses them in a much more abstract manner. As Richard Steinitz explained, Messiaen turns the words into music by giving ‘each letter not only matching pitch and duration but its own chord and instrumentation.’
On Thursday, the Biblical message was provided by strident brass. Osborne played the song of Townsend’s solitaire, a type of thrush, with precision and dedication. It was fascinating to watch the geophone’s first appearance, held horizontally as the ‘rocks’ rolled around inside it to create a sound like shifting sand in the desert, returning us to Earth after gazing up at the stars.
The writing on the Wall
The ominous words ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’ come from the Biblical Book of Daniel, which tells the story of King Belshazzar, the last ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Belshazzar looted Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and held a great feast with the spoils. A disembodied hand appeared at the feast, writing the words ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’ on the wall. Daniel translated the words as follows: Mene: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting Upharsin: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians
Image : Belshazzar’s Feast (Daniel 5:5) by Rembrandt – National Gallery, London. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The fourth movement, for solo piano, describes an African bird, the Heuglin’s robin or the white-browed robin-chat. Michael Clive describes its song as ‘melodious and highly variable… heard at dawn and dusk.’ Osborne brought out the rich, vibrant colours of the bird and its song, with contrasting tone and dynamics. He played across the whole piano, sometimes low and melancholy, at other times high and precise, with incredible power where required, digging right in.
The fifth movement describes Cedar Breaks, a ‘natural amphitheatre sliding down towards a deep abyss’, and the ‘gift of awe’ that it provokes. Rather than being fearful of the immensity of the landscape, Messiaen said, ‘to replace fear by awe opens a window for the adoration.’ The fear was expressed by a frightening low melody and cinematic strings. We heard the sound of the American robin and crashing chords, which brought a brief, terrifying climax. Unusual instruments included a solo trumpet mouthpiece (only) and the return of the wind machine. The awe inspired by nature was expressed in bright brass with several gongs; Messiaen again combined a description of nature with the religious feelings it provoked in him. There was a lovely deep brass melody with explosive gongs. Complex, almost aleatoric music with the full orchestra and amazing textures led to silence and the lonely sound of the wind machine.
Part 2: 6 Appel interstellaire (Interstellar call) for solo horn 7 Bryce Canyon et les rochers rouge-orange (Bryce Canyon and the red-orange rocks)
Part 2 of Des canyons aux étoiles… begins with a movement for solo horn, Interstellar call. It was the first movement to be written, in 1971, to commemorate Messiaen’s friend Jean-Paul Guézac, who died aged 38. Martin Owen stood to play his solo part as if standing at the top of a mountain. His playing was at once intimate and declamatory. Sometimes, the horn sounded like a hunting horn; elsewhere, it was mournful, banshee-like. In an incredible performance, he provided a whole range of sounds and extended techniques for the instrument.
The next movement is about Bryce Canyon, which Messiaen described as,
“…the greatest marvel of Utah. It is a gigantic circle of rocks – red, orange, violet – in fantastic shapes: castles, square towers, natural windows, bridges, statues, columns, whole cities, with here and there a deep black hole.“
The movement demonstrates Messiaen’s sheer joy at this fantastic spectacle. It began with a joyful, dancing tune which was reminiscent of another long-form ecstatic piece, Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie (1948), which the BBC Philharmonic performed at the Proms earlier this year. A splendidly deep brass theme was accompanied by swirling strings, and pulsating chords led to incredibly intense string chords. Osborne, illustrating the call of the Stellar’s Jay, again dug deep into the piano keyboard and then leapt back as if the keys were burning his fingers, playing with stunning precision. Deep brass and scurrying strings opened up shafts of golden light, and a chorus of birds blossomed. The full orchestra reached a glowing, exuberant climax; a gong died away, bringing this remarkable movement to an end.
Dramatic Aerial View of Lake and Canyons in Utah. Photo by Sergey Guk on Pexels.com
Part 3: 8 Les Ressuscités et le chant de l’étoile Aldébaran (The resurrected and the song of the star Aldebaran) 9 Le Moqueur polyglotte (The mockingbird) for solo piano 10 La Grive des bois (The wood thrush) 11 Omao, leiothrix, elepaio, shama (ʻōmaʻo, leiothrix, ʻelepaio, shama) 12 Zion Park et la cité céleste (Zion Park and the celestial city)
There were more echoes of the Turangalîla-Symphonie in the opening movement of part 3; it shared the serene joy of Turangalîla‘s sixth movement, Jardin du sommeil d’amour (Garden of Love’s Sleep). The soaring melodies of the flutes and piccolo sounded like the sine-wave electronic swoops of the ondes Martenot in Turangalîla. The movement looked upwards, literally to the star Aldébaran, the brightest star in the Taurus constellation; and figuratively – Messiaen chose the star to represent himself as a composer as its name means ‘follower’ in Arabic. The movement also looked up to Heaven, to the song of resurrection sung by stars, inspired by the Biblical Book of Job, ‘When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy’ (Job 38: 7). This was a gorgeous moment of stasis beyond time, beautifully played by the BBC Philharmonic and soloists; the world stopped turning below the surface glitter of the glockenspiel and piano.
After the shimmering stars of the eighth movement, it was time for Steven Osborne to shine again in the first of three movements featuring the songs of various birds. In this movement for solo piano, Osborne was astonishingly virtuosic, combining incredible energy with huge concentration to depict the Mockingbird, described by Steinitz as ‘the most famous bird of the United States’. At times, he silently pressed the keys to maintain the piano’s resonance, creating what sounded like a halo of electronics. Elsewhere, he played clusters with the palm of his hand and with his arms. Steinitz, whilst acknowledging Messiaen’s technical innovations here, was dismissive of the movement as a whole, criticising the ‘fragmented, seemingly directionless phrases of the mockingbird [which] do somewhat undermine the broader architecture and pacing of the whole work.’ Steinitz made a strong case to justify his opinion, but he might have changed his mind if he’d had the privilege of seeing Osborne’s intensely visceral performance which made this movement one of the highlights of the evening.
The next movement was based on the song of the wood thrush, a bird found in many parts of North America. The movement felt like a theme and variations with a sparkling, optimistic theme for high percussion and violin harmonics restated at various points. According to Paul Griffiths, even in this description of birdsong, Messiaen makes a subtle Biblical reference, ‘eventually the slow form, through cycles of repetition, is reconfigured, now shining and simple – a symbol of the ‘new name’ that is promised [in the Biblical Book of Revelation] for each individual after resurrection.’
“He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.”
(Revelation 2:17)
The last movement of the trio of birdsong celebrated various birds – the ʻōmaʻo, leiothrix, ʻelepaio and shama – which can only be found far away from Utah, in Africa and the Hawaiian islands. These are all small songbirds that are physically similar to the wood thrush of the previous movement. But, as Griffiths points out, ‘the first song is avian, not human’, a robust theme for bassoon and horn which alternated with an aviary of birds made up of piano, xylorimba, woodwind and strings. The two factions joined together in a celebratory dance. There was a moment of contemplative calm from the piano before the dance resumed. The movement was notable for the range of orchestral colour brought by the orchestra under the baton of Ludovic Morlot, who conducted superbly all evening. One striking moment was when the wind machine sounded like a siren, recalling Amériques (1921) and Ionisation (1931) by the French composer Edgard Varèse.
The final movement celebrates the earthly Zion Park and Heaven – ‘the celestial city’. Messiaen saw Zion as ‘a symbol of Paradise.’ It features birds from Zion Park, the lazuli bunting whose song was performed by Tim Williams on glockenspiel, and Cassin’s finch, Steven Osborne on piano. A brass chorale kept returning ecstatically to the same chord, as did a glowing string motif. Tubular bells brought a ceremonial ending, resonating in joyful exultation.
Martin Owen (horn) Paul Patrick (xylorimba) Tim Williams (glockenspiel) Steven Osborne (piano) BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Ludovic Morlot (conductor)
The concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available to listen for 30 days after the date of broadcast on BBC Sounds
Sources
Peter Hill (Editor),The Messiaen Companion (Faber and Faber 1995) Steinitz, Richard, Des canyons aux étoiles… (Ibid.) Potter, Caroline, Programme Notes (BBC Philharmonic Orchestra) Messiaen, Olivier Programme Notes for Des canyons aux étoiles… Griffiths, Paul, Des canyons aux étoiles… (2023 Programme notes for the Utah Symphony recording conducted by Thierry Fischer, Hyperion records) Clive, Michael What to Listen for in Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles (utahsymphony.org 5 April 2022) Ide, Wendy, Conclave review – Ralph Fiennes is almighty in thrilling papal tussle (The Guardian 1 December 2024) BBC Proms Performance Archive
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 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.
Anna Clyne. Image credit Victoria Stevens
Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 2
The rest of the concert featured the composer as hero of their own work. DmitriShostakovich 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, Moderatoby 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, althoughRostropovich 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 StraussEin 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.
Richard Strauss’s wife, the German operatic soprano Pauline de Ahna
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, includingquotations 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 RostropovichModerato (encore) Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben
Sources
A Conversation with Composer Anna Clyne. Credit WRTImusic/YouTube/Alex Ariff.
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.
Last Saturday’s concert by the BBC Philharmonic took magic as its theme from Stravinsky’s 1911 ballet Petrushka, in which a magician brings the puppets to life. But this imaginatively programmed concert began with mischief, the other theme of the evening, in Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. Written in 1894–95 by Richard Strauss, the tone poem describes the practical jokes of the trickster of the title, a figure who has appeared in European literature since the early sixteenth century. A vast orchestra occupied the stage to illustrate his pranks, playing superbly, with playful enthusiasm, spirited soloists, and lots of detail and humour brought out by conductor John Storgårds who was active and expressive throughout. The piece had a false ending, illustrating Till’s death, after which Till’s theme returned but in a more lugubrious form as if he had returned to haunt us after death, asking him to mourn him. But before we got too sad, Till had the last laugh when he returned with a sparkling version of his theme – a jolly and inspiring start to the concert.
Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto (1796) continued the jolly theme, with lovely light orchestral textures in the first movement, stately strings in the second movement, and more of the jolly strings in the third. Those looking for magic could find it in the playing of the Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger. He played with a golden tone, rich and warm, with lovely articulation, sailing above the orchestra with lovely phrasing and great fluidity. His first movement cadenza, which he wrote himself as Haydn doesn’t provide one, was magical, leaping up and down the scale then becoming much simpler with subtle ornaments, ending with a tone that recalled the great Miles Davis. Hardenberger was a relaxed presence, joking with a violinist as he left the stage, and returning to a huge and well-deserved cheer.
The American composer Betsy Jolas was born in 1926 and is apparently still composing at the age of 98. She was born in Paris but moved with her family to the USA in the early 1940s, returning to Paris in 1946 to study with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. She was Messiaen’s assistant from 1971 to 1974, and wrote Onze Lieder (Eleven Songs) in 1977. The piece showed some influences from Messiaen, including the opening chord and some of the piano writing which could have come from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (1941). But Jolas has found her own voice, influenced more by sixteenth century polyphonic vocal music by the likes of Orlando di Lasso than by the intellectual rigours of the Darmstadt School of composers. Her love of vocal music was shown in the structure of the piece, a series of eleven short songs.Hardenberger brought the magic of his virtuosic playing to the solo trumpet part. It was also easy to imagine him as a magician, leading the chamber orchestra players as their parts echoed his. Particularly effective were the passages where a muted, distant-sounding trumpet from the orchestra echoed the solo trumpet in a moving duet. And towards the end there was a huge outburst from the solo trumpet as the orchestra clattered to the floor in anguish. The variety of Hardenberger’s playing was stunning. Sometimes the trumpet had a low rasp like a didgeridoo. Elsewhere equalling the playing and tone of avantgarde trumpeter Markus Stockhausen. And at other times his playing was decorative with a filigree effect, reminding us of the cadenza in the Haydn Concerto.
Hardenberger introduced the encore as, ‘another piece by an old lady who is still writing’, Joni Mitchell who is 80 years old. He played a gorgeous arrangement of Mitchell’s Both Sides, Now (1969) for string orchestra and solo trumpet. The piece features in an emotional scene from the film Love Actually (2003), in which Emma Thompson’s character quietly weeps as she listens to it. Hardenberger’s playing was warm and rich in this lovely piece.
Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides, Now fromHåkan Hardenberger’s 2012 album of the same name
The second half of the concert was a stunning performance of the 1911 version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka. If Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks is programmatic and episodic in structure and content, then Petrushka is even more so. Following along with a very detailed synopsis of the ballet by Robert Philip during the concert, it was possible to pick out each of the vividly characterised sections of the four Tableaus with ease, so expressive was the orchestral playing. Tableau One The Shrovetide Fair began with glittering woodwind and thrillingly fast chords illustrating the bustling of the crowd at the fair. Storgårds brought out every detail of the orchestral texture while maintaining momentum, with precise syncopation and perfect ensemble. The lilting flute solo from Alex Jakeman, illustrating the ‘Magic Trick’ of the magician introducing the puppets in his theatre was lovely. John Bradbury’s solo clarinet duetting with Ian Buckle on piano was colourful and vibrant. The Second Tableau Petrushka’s Room opened with excellent bassoon and trumpet solos, and Petrushka’s anger at the magician was stirringly drawn by the orchestra. The Third Tableau, The Moor’s Room began with a lurching evil-sounding dance created by unison clarinet and bass clarinet. The music of the flirtatious Ballerina, a slow waltz with scything lower strings, was a moment of quiet magic. There was virtuosic trumpet playing as Petrushka appeared, followed by brilliant flute and bassoon solos as the Moor and Petrushka fought. The fierce dissonances of muted trumpets brought out the tension between the Moor and Petrushka. and there were savage chords as the latter was beaten, the music still sounding fresh in this performance even though the piece is more than a century old. The final Tableau The Shrovetide Fair (Towards Evening) began with a bustling recreation of the opening of the First Tableau. Again, the orchestra excelled. It was fascinating to hear how Petrushka was a bridge between The Firebird (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913). Some of the crunchy, fiercely rhythmic orchestral chords cast forward to Stravinsky’s Rite which used the whole orchestra as a percussion instrument, and the quiet orchestral chords near the end cast back to the more romantic style of The Firebird. At the very end, Petrushka’s ghost appeared, bringing us back to the death of Till Eulenspiegel at the beginning of the concert. The ending of Petrushka was strangely ambiguous and unresolved, but the audience on Saturday were left in no doubt about the quality of the BBC Philharmonic, both as individual solo players and as an ensemble, bringing this special evening to a magnificent end.
Performers
BBC Philharmonic John Storgårds conductor Håkan Hardenberger trumpet
Repertoire
Strauss Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks Haydn Trumpet Concerto Betsy Jolas Onze Lieder Joni Mitchell Arr. R. Pontinen Both Sides, Now Stravinsky Petrushka (1911 Version)
Source
Philip, Robert The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music (Yale University Press, 2018)
The complete concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 19.30 on Monday 14 October and will be available on BBC Sounds for 30 days after that.
Searing Shostakovich, and a Profound Lament from Cassandra Miller
BBC Philharmonic. Photo by Andy Paradise
Wednesday evening’s Prom featured the BBC Philharmonic conducted by their Chief Conductor, John Storgårds. It began with a new work, I cannot love without trembling, a viola concerto written by the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller for Lawrence Power, who premiered the work with the Brussels Philharmonic in March 2023. The concerto takes its title from a quotation from the French philosopher, Simone Weil (1909-1943), in a letter she wrote to another French philosopher Gustave Thibon,
“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling”
Quotation from Weil’s Gravity and Grace, published posthumously by Gustave Thibon
The concerto has four movements or verses with a closing cadenza, each part taking its name from a Weil quotation, and it runs without a break. Weil’s Gravity and Grace describes what separates us and what brings us together, based on the Platonic concept of μεταξύ (‘metaxu’ or ‘metaxy’ meaning ‘between’). Miller heard recordings of the violinist Alexis Zoumbas who left the northern mountains of Greece in the early nineteenth century to go to New York. According to the Mississippi records website,
“Zoumbas had the rare gift of expressing emotion clearly and urgently through his instrument, and his violin feels like an extension of his heart, soul, and the deep musical history of his faraway home in Epirus”
Alexis Zoumbas • Epirotiko Moiroloi from American Museum of Paramusicology
Zoumbas’ improvisations evoke a feeling of Ξενατία (Xenatia), Greek for a ‘catastrophic longing for home’, based on Mοιρολόϊ (moiroloi), Greek mourning songs. Miller internalised Zoumbas’ moiroloi recording by singing along over and over again, creating a sacred ritual based on deep meditation. Miller describes this as ‘automatic singing’, which seems akin to automatic writing. The result is a spellbinding piece of music in which the audience shares her dreams and rituals, and joins her in the intense sense of mourning and lamentation that the piece conveys. Even the soloist is invited to share this meditative state – at one point the score instructs the violist to play ‘with eyes closed.’ The orchestra is invited to join the collective dreaming, often playing sotto voce, surrounding the soloist with shimmering, muted soundscapes. As Miller says,
“Within Zoumbas’ plaintive song, I sought a metaphysical space in which to dream – a space of separation-connection-absence-presence – in the hope to lament and to dream together in this hall tonight.“
Lawrence Power viola, BBC Philharmonic, John Storgårds conductor. Photo by Andy Paradise
On Wednesday evening, Lawrence Power was a superbly virtuosic advocate, an ideal focus for the piece. The orchestra provided brief moments of gently ecstatic lyricism, and at one point almost drowned the viola with brass flourishes and chattering woodwind, and there was a snatch of hope as a solo flute brought a moment of glowing light. But the pervading mood was mournful, with slow-moving orchestral textures, and a passage where the basses slowly sank down is if drowning, and another where the orchestra appeared to sink into the abyss.
There were two particularly remarkable sections in the solo part. Accompanied by distant thunder from the bass drum, Lawrence Power rhythmically plucked a single note while the melody he played floated anxiously above and below. And the closing cadenza had a frenzied solo part, a bowed marimba shimmering with light as the soloist seemed to be fighting an intense internal battle with himself, while the strummings and murmurings of the orchestral strings tried to console him. At the end, Power held his bow aloft in deserved triumph and there was a long silence as the audience contemplated what they had just heard. As the applause rose around the hall, a spotlight fell on the composer who clapped and blew kisses at the performers.
Composer Cassandra Miller. Photo by Andy Paradise
Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, which we heard in the second half of the concert, has a very different back story from the Miller piece. Shostakovich began writing it after the international success of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1934. But his world turned much darker a year later when Stalin and party officials attended a production and the state newspaper Pravda condemned the opera as ‘Muddle instead of Music’, due to its “leftist’ confusion, instead of natural, human music.’ The opera was immediately withdrawn, but Shostakovich continued with his symphony, and began rehearsing it with a view to performing it in late 1936. In circumstances that are not entirely clear, the symphony was withdrawn and was not performed until 1961, some years after the death of Stalin .
Shostakovich was studying Mahler when he wrote the symphony, and some Mahlerian influence can be heard, but it is Mahler through the lens of the later composer’s anguished, bitter, sarcastic sensibility; Shostakovich remains distinctly himself. In the programme note, Pauline Fairclough acknowledges the debt to Mahler, particularly in the second movement, but she also points out that Shostakovich wrote his symphony in ‘acutely difficult circumstances’ and that the work, ‘seems to mark the country’s descent into a profound darkness paralysed by fear.’
Fairclough states that the symphony is, ‘today regarded as one of Shostakovich’s greatest works, despite its difficult history.’ The musicologist Robert Philip is more circumspect; he says,
“critics continue to debate whether it really forms a coherent whole, or is more of a gigantic improvisation, full of sudden effects that have little or no relationship with each other.”
The symphony lacks the immediacy and strong melodies of the composer’s fifth and tenth symphonies, and it’s no coincidence that those two works have been performed 66 times at the Proms between them, as opposed to 13 times for the Fourth. But conductor John Storgårds was a passionate and entirely convincing advocate for the piece, bringing a monumental intensity to a performance that gripped from beginning to end, his energy throughout ensuring that the piece felt much more coherent than some critics may have suggested.
Conductor John Storgårds. Photo by Andy Paradise
The orchestra shared their conductor’s passion and commitment to the piece and its hugely contrasting dynamics and musical styles. The whole orchestra played superbly; the woodwind in particular shone throughout, and special mention should be made of the stunning playing of bassoonist Roberto Giaccaglia. Later the trombonist Richard Brown provided a wonderful solo just before the brass finale in which Mahler is seen through a fever dream, accompanied by demonic percussion. The ending was remarkable; Shostakovich could easily have chosen to finish on the Mahlerian funeral march, but, like the ending of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, it’s dark, troubled and ambiguous. Against a C minor chord on strings, a celesta provides anxious arpeggios, ending on a D leaving the thought hanging in the air. After a long gap of silence, the audience applauded for a full six minutes, many standing to acknowledge the superb performance and enthusiastically acknowledging individual soloists and separate sections of the orchestra. Storgårds gestured to the score of the symphony on his music stand, as if acknowledging the composer’s genius, leaving some audience members to wonder what might have happened to the composer’s musical development if it hadn’t been for that fateful article in Pravda that cast such a dark shadow over the rest of his life.
BBC Philharmonic, John Storgårds conductor. Photo by Andy Paradise
Programme
Cassandra Miller I cannot love without trembling * (Viola Concerto) Dmitry Shostakovich Symphony No. 4 in C minor
*Co-commissioned by BBC Radio 3, Brussels Philharmonic, Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, and Scottish Chamber Orchestra; supported by The Viola Commissioning Circle
Performers
BBC Philharmonic, conducted by John Storgårds (Chief Conductor) Lawrence Power, viola
Sources
Cassandra Miller’s website Faber music website The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music by Robert Philip (Yale 2020) The Proms Archive The Proms Guide 2024 Prom 16 Concert programme book
This concert is available to listen on BBC sounds and via the Radio 3 website until the end of the Proms
