Review of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet with Gábor Takács-Nagy and Manchester Camerata at the Stoller Hall, Manchester

 

Mozart’s late piano concertos are among his greatest and subtlest creations, and consequently both immensely rewarding and, by the same token, very challenging.

The ongoing recording project by Manchester Camerata under its music director, Gábor Takács-Nagy, with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist, brought a fascinating concert at Chetham’s on Friday night. Word had clearly got around: there was hardly a spare seat to be found.

Takács-Nagy and the orchestra, led by Caroline Pether, got things off to a fizzing start with the Marriage of Figaro overture – contemporary with the C minor concerto, K491 and no. 24, which was to follow it. It was meant to be a fresh take on a familiar piece, said the maestro, and so it proved. With 20 strings in total, the balance was bound to favour clarity in the wind lines, and they emerged prominently, even from a big round sound underpinned by modern timpani.

Big sound was a characteristic of Bavouzet’s approach to the concerto, too, with plenty of pedal used on the Schimmel instrument to underscore the music’s tragi-Romantic qualities. He knows how to be self-effacing, too, and let the woodwind soloists have their fair share of the limelight, but the piano has necessarily to claim much of it. He had a grand and dramatic first movement cadenza to offer (by Hummel), which contributed to the solemn and weighty effect.

The slow movement of K491 is a puzzle: such a simple, seemingly childish, opening tune surely requires some decoration, but how much? Bavouzet began very modestly, indeed making it seem a mere formality, and though the ingenuity increased (and there was more in the finale), I wasn’t quite convinced it was being used to heighten the emotional impact of the music (as classical embellishment really should). The finale itself presents its problems, and conductor and soloist must have decided it needed some drama to finish, with a touch on the accelerator when the minor key signature returned.

The second half of the concert began with a real curiosity: an overture for a play by Goethe (Erwin und Elmire) written by Princess Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, a contemporary of Mozart. Made-up name, I thought when I first saw it (we are near April Fools’ Day, after all), but apparently she did exist. Was it a bit cynical to dig up her efforts under the ABO Trust’s programme to promote historical women composers? The fact that her composition, a pleasant exercise in Empfindsamkeit, survived probably only illustrates another inequality (of aristocrats versus mere professional musicians) in her day. But at least – unlike Mozart – she believed in the employment prospects of second flutes.

The other piano concerto was no. 25 in C major, K503. It had all the virtues of the previous Bavouzet/Takács-Nagy major key concerto interpretations – lightness of spirit, conversational interplay between soloist and orchestra, well crafted contrasts and, in this case, a bit of a tempo change in the first movement to energise proceedings. The big cadenza (by the young American virtuoso Kenneth Broberg) was a real turn, involving a near-quotation of La Marseillaise which encouraged many a chuckle among its listeners.

In the lovely Andante slow movement Bavouzet soon began to charm with some melodic embellishment, very tasteful again. The finale was full of brilliance and romped home with a dizzying sprint of an Allegretto.

 

CD review

It's almost Christmas again, and here's a suggestion for something to get for a pianist who wants to venture into the unknown a bit ...

Eric Craven: Pieces for Pianists volume 1 (performed by Mary Dullea, Métier msv 28601).

Eric Craven is a composer who knows his own mind but doesn’t impose his own will. These 25 short pieces for piano, published in ‘progressive’ order like an old-fashioned collection of classics designed to be an aid to learning, are notated in an unusual way.

There are no key signatures (though the score is entirely precise about which notes are to be played and their relative time values, and there are bar lines) and the performer can decide their own tempo, dynamics, phrasing, articulation and pedalling. Craven calls it ‘my Non-Prescriptive Low-order format’.

Mary Dullea is a distinguished musician and recording artist who appreciates the freedom this gives in executing them and the element of improvisation and potential continuing variation that’s essential to their realization in practice. Recording them inevitably archives one particular way on one particular day, and I was a bit surprised at first how little extra characterization she seeks to impose on the music in these versions – but I guess she’s keen to let the music ‘speak for itself’ even under Eric Craven’s conditions.

She rightly divines echoes of a variety of other composers’ styles to be found in them, and just occasionally you ask yourself why she took certain decisions (such as keeping the pedal down for a bar or bars when a seemingly sequential or parallel passage had different treatment) … but the point of the recordings, which vary in duration from 1 minute 20 seconds to 4 minutes 49 seconds, is really just to say ‘Here they are – make of them what you will’, and I can only repeat that invitation.

 

Review of the Hallé concert with Marc-André Hamelin and Ryan Wigglesworth, at the Bridgewater Hall

Marc-Andre Hamelin (credit Sim Cannety-Clarke) 

 

Ryan Wigglesworth is one of those musicians who are practically perfect in every way. The greatest thing to come out of Sheffield, musically, since Sterndale Bennett, he’s pianist, conductor, academic and composer.

So with him as Artist in Association the Hallé get lots of options. Last night we witnessed two of them: him as composer, and as conductor in charge of his own work as well as that of others. His Piano Concerto was premiered at the BBC Proms in 2019 with the brilliant Marc-André Hamelin as soloist, and Hamelin was here in Manchester to play it again.

I can’t pretend that I’d expect it to become a popular favourite (the whole idea of concerto as solo showpiece with big tunes, originating in vocal aria forms and making great box office in the 19^th and pre-Second World War 20^th centuries, seems to have rather run out of steam more recently), but it gave both pianist and orchestra plenty to think about – and it rewards its audience with four varied movements which rarely lose concision in concept or expression.

The third of four movements (where the orchestra is reduced to strings and harp and the piano sings a Polish folk song, with decorative imitation of itself, both higher and fainter) is in many ways its centre of gravity – probably its longest section in terms of pure duration. Before it there’s a brief, prelude-like movement with long-breathed string phrases and then a Scherzo with almost helter-skelter perpetual motion from the piano; after it there’s a finale more in traditional piano-v-orchestra-battle style, which ends as the piano “wanders” (Wigglesworth’s own word) to a close on a single, very low, note – not really destined to produce any roar of applause.

Two of the concerto’s movements have the same names as two of the pieces of incidental music Mendelssohn wrote for A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1843, which formed the opening of the concert (done in the order they would come in the play): both a Scherzo and a Nocturne, which were both played as the little jewels they are by the Hallé under Ryan Wigglesworth’s baton (and led by Paul Barritt). He has a calm and precise stick technique which on this occasion gave rise to delicate, lively, dynamically flexible and precisely articulated playing, full of charming touches in part-playing balance and first foot-tappingly joyful and then gloriously rich and romantic.

And finally there was Schumann’s Symphony no. 2: romanticism of a kind that followed very soon afterwards but with bigger architectural ambitions. British writers of Schumann’s own generation used the word “Schumannism” as a one-word cypher for over-wrought expression and neuroticism in music (as they considered it), but Ryan Wigglesworth knew how to handle its idiom: the waxing and waning emotional intensity of the first movement became a structure of slowly evolving optimism, despite shocks and surprises along the way, and its unorthodox finale seemed to keep slowing to a halt, as if unsure how to find the right frame of mind, before it suddenly got there.

But the third, Adagio espressivo, movement is what makes this symphony worth hearing, really: it’s a song without words to begin with and end, and there was, as in the Mendelssohn, lovely playing from the Hallé’s gifted wind principals.

Review of Manchester Camerata's livestreamed 'Mozart in Motion' concert at the Stoller Hall

Alexander Sitkovetsky and Timothy Ridout play Mozart with Manchester Camerata

Mozart played by Manchester Camerata is always a treat, and in addition to their recent public concert at the Stoller Hall they did another one last Thursday in the same hall – this time empty of people in the auditorium but live-streamed as ‘Mozart in Motion’.

Alexander Sitkovetsky shared the direction with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, as each appeared as director-and-soloist – and Sitkovetsky directed the ‘Jupiter’ symphony, from the leader’s position (and jumping up out of it), for good measure. Caroline Pether was alongside him as ever-alert leader in the first two items: the Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola (with Timothy Ridout as viola soloist) and Piano Concerto no. 9 (the Jenamy, or ‘Jeunehomme’ as it’s long been called).

Nicely presented in the hands of Apple & Biscuit Productions, with Camerata principal flute Amina Hussain filmed in the hall stalls doing a brief introduction and later talking to Jean-Efflam Bavouzet about the concerto, and Caroline Pether ushering in the symphony, it was an extraordinarily good night of music-making.

The string Sinfonia Concertante (K364) is one of those pieces of youthful Mozart that’s pure pleasure from start to finish. Sitkovetsky and Ridout faced the orchestra from the front of the stage (why turn away from them with no one in the audience seats?) and were a superbly matched duo, neither stealing the limelight but both bringing lyrical beauty and eloquence to their role. The Camerata players followed suit, with suave and graceful playing that was also neatly pointed where necessary and had real weight and attack in its crescendi – and could turn sombre on a sixpence, too. The slow movement had a lovely lilt and long, smooth phrasing, and the finale was great fun, perky and playful.

For the piano concerto (K272), Bavouzet, too, could face the orchestra, and his performance had all the distinction I remember from their concert performance of it together in September 2019. The piece reached depths of expression in the slow movement that he’s explored so well before, and the finale had all its pace and exuberance again.  The piano (it’s got a big tone anyway) was pretty closely mic’d for Mozart – it may sound like that to performers in a ‘normal’ concert, but the on-screen experience should, I think, match that of an audience sitting at a distance as we usually do.

The Symphony no. 41 (K551) is a winner is any circumstances and was given exemplary treatment under Sitkovetsky, the wind players as ever providing much of the distinction to the sound. That amazing finale bubbled and bounced – it never fails to lift the spirits.

 

Review of Maestro Glorioso, by John Holden

 

Maestro Glorioso: Ten Essays in Celebration of Sir John Barbirolli, by John Holden (Kennington, the Barbirolli Society, 2021). Price £20.

 It’s amazing how the magic of John Barbirolli’s conducting still entrances, 50 years after his death.

Partly that’s because of the recordings he made in the later years of his life, captured as they were with the technical quality to be completely rewarding in today’s digital age. But for those of us who saw him in person, in action, there’s more than that, something completely mesmeric about his personality and platform manner that never leaves the memory.

Who can forget his entrances, hand on breast in ‘Little Corporal’ style (and he would never even walk on to a platform unless there was complete silence in the auditorium), his royal-style waves, his conducting of the National Anthem facing the hall as if daring all present to join in – and of course the electric charge in his every movement once the music proper began?

He was a ‘showman’, people said. Yes, but a showman in the service of great music: everything arose from his earnest, sincere dedication to his craft. And he was a complete professional: performances that often seemed full of spontaneity were prepared in painstaking detail and rehearsed so lovingly that the music felt spontaneous, and the ‘affection’ and even ‘indulgence’ that critics described in his readings were always finely calculated and intentional. There was a feeling about so many pieces that when you heard the way Barbirolli did them, there could really be none better.

That’s an aspect of what Raymond Holden has described in these anniversary essays, published recently by the Barbirolli Society. He brings the insights of a practising conductor and the thoroughness of a scholar. Some of his chapters (which are based on his lectures, broadcasts and articles over the years) comprise details of Barbirolli’s life and career that are relatively well known and available in other sources – though always cogently assembled.

But the most interesting chapters, to me, are those where he analyses the marked performing scores that JB used, now available to researchers in the British Library, and the outcomes of his preparation as we hear them in some of his greatest recorded performances – in Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ symphony, Bruckner’s eighth and Elgar’s In the South in particular. You can see his musical mind at work – not just in his ever-meticulous bowing of the strings’ parts (which he never tired of and which undoubtedly had much to do with the famous ‘Barbirolli sound’), but also in his tempo calculations and dynamic control. 

His approach to great musical structures was one common to the great 19th century maestros from Richard Wagner onwards and also the early 20th century conductors from whom JB learnt directly – ‘architectonic’ is a word Raymond Holden uses frequently to describe it – and saw tempo change as essential to building shape, and highlighting each work or movement’s supreme climax (look at Mahler’s scores to see how he intended these to be patent in performance).

The reference notes to these essays are magisterial and many-faceted: though one little oversight seems to have crept in, as he describes Barbirolli’s famous 1964 recording with the Halle of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius as a ‘studio recording’, though I think there are those who still remember it being made, at least mainly, in the Free Trade Hall.

 

 

Review of the Hallé's filmed concert at the Bridgewater Hall, released 29th July 2021

Sir Mark Elder conducts the Hallé in The Firebird suite  c.The Hallé

The Hallé ‘Summer Season’ of live music in Manchester has included streamed film versions of three of the concerts, and the final one, which I had to miss seeing in person, is now available. Sir Mark Elder conducts and the programme is all Russian music: Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky.

A ‘Russian night’ was often a popular formula in the orchestra’s summer Proms a decade or so ago, but this was no set of Tchaikovsky and others’ greatest hits: though Stravinsky’s The Firebird suite would be a draw any time, the other two pieces are comparative rarities and it was a great idea to include them.

As through the entirely filmed ‘Winter Season’, the production standards of this document of the orchestra’s playing are extremely high. The virtuosity of the camera operation and mixing and the splendour of the recorded sound are almost the equal of the musicians’ playing in itself. And again there are bits of chat between items, from Sir Mark and a number of orchestra members and staff, which are fascinating to hear and bring light to the whole experience. There’s also something unexpected, both at the beginning and the end: the former a rather superfluous succession of thank you statements from and about Siemens for their sponsorship (not that those are undeserved, but they dampen the atmosphere a bit at the start) – the latter I’ll tell you about later.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite from his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan proved a rich mine of sonic jewels and musical storytelling. Its opening depiction of the Tsar setting out on a journey leapt into life with precise and spritely jollifications, and the following seascape (not completely unlike the one in Scheherazade) had plenty of subtlety in Sir Mark’s reading – the rolling billows had to be kind enough for a princess and baby to survive floating on them in a barrel, according to the story. The music worked up a head of steam, however, for the finale’s picture of golden-helmeted knights and their galloping steeds, in which the orchestra, led by Kanako Ito and spread out on the extended stage as so often before in their lockdown era, sounded magnificent.

Rachmaninov’s The Rock is an early work and interesting if only for the signs of the genius to come, but it was played with such care and love that the beginnings of his extraordinary gift for uncurling, everlasting melodies proved a wonderful vehicle for the woodwind players and for heartstring-tugging tone from the violins. And the sweet and thrilling sounds continued in Stravinsky’s The Firebird suite (1945 version), the Final Hymn, dramatically punched out in its emphatic ending, no less than the thunderous Infernal Dance.

One of the memorable things about these filmed performances (and I seemed to notice it more in this than most others) is the chance to see the conductor as the orchestra see him … and indeed in close-up, too. It’s an experience in itself, and gives you an insight into the art of the musician who never makes a sound but enables all the others to do so as one.

And the unexpected final bit? Rimsky-Korsakov wrote The Flight of the Bumble Bee for The Tale of Tsar Saltan, though it’s not in the suite. It comes as a bonus (or an encore if you like to think of it so) at the end of the film.

 

The recording of the concert is available until 29 October: link thehalle.vhx.tv/products/

Review of The Barber of Seville at Clonter Opera

Elsa Roux Chamoux as Rosina in 

Clonter Opera's production of The Barber 

of Seville. Credit Edward Robinson 

The “Glyndebourne of the North” really came up trumps on Thursday evening, with the smell of haymaking in the air (Clonter Opera’s base is surrounded by farmland) and glorious sunshine to revel in.

I don’t remember choosing to have a picnic outside there before (there’s always space inside for dining, too), but it was the natural choice as well as the advisable one in these Covid times. Inside, the seating was well spaced on alternate rows, the only slight worry being that here, as in some other classical venues I’ve noticed, the clientele includes some geriatrics who don’t seem to realise that wearing a face covering means you actually cover your face, not just dangle it from your chin.

The production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia (in Italian, with English sur-title translation) was lively and entertaining. Director Greg Eldridge (who has had a special post created for him at Covent Garden) must be responsible for that, but the youthful cast were also very much to be credited, working hard and singing with distinction.

Of them, the standout was Henry Neill, as Figaro. He sang the same-named role in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (which, based like this one on Beaumarchais, continues the story begun by The Barber) for Clonter in 2017, making a big impression, and has gone on to an international career. The other low-voiced roles – Dr Bartolo (Adam Maxey) and Don Basilio (Benjamin Schilperoort) – were also powerfully sung and comically adroit.

Rosina, the heroine, was a very feisty Latin lady in Elsa Roux Chamoux’ interpretation (exactly as she should be) and showed a lovely mezzo tone, and Samuel Kibble, taking the taxing role of Count Almaviva with wit and charm, is a very promising tenor. George Reynolds, filling up the cast as variously Fiorello, police officer and notary, is another excellent baritone, and Faryl Smith – who really only gets her solo chance in one aria near the end – proved a great dumb-show actress, a fine ensemble singer and estimable solo soprano. Philip Sunderland conducted the small Clonter Sinfonia in great style and kept everything well controlled.

And the set, designed by Bettina John, was something special for Clonter: a revolve! They don’t have much a stage to put one on, and it has to be hand-operated like a children’s playground roundabout, but it gave the opportunity for four little interiors to be represented, with doors between some of them, and was cleverly exploited at every turn.