Intermezzo

1 down, 75 to go - the First Night of the Proms

Prom 1: Christine Brewer / Pierre-Laurent Aimard / Nicholas Daniel / Wayne Marshall / Royal College of Music Brass / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Jiří Bělohlávek - Royal Albert Hall, 18 July 2008

R. Strauss Festliches Präludium
Mozart Oboe Concerto in C major, K314
R. Strauss Four Last Songs
Messiaen Dieu parmi nous, from 'La Nativité du Seigneur'
Beethoven Rondo in B-flat, for piano and orchestra
E. Carter Caténaires (solo piano)
Scriabin The Poem of Ecstasy

If there's one thing the Proms are good for, it's a whinge or two. So here, in no particular order:

- the weather. In place of the usual bugbear, scorching heat inside and out, this year's Proms started damp and blustery, with the odd shower sprinkling those of us queuing outside. The white at the top of the picture >>>>>
isn't overexposure btw - it's a solid bank of cloud....

- the first night programme. A bitty 'sampler' that needed a different orchestra/stage configuration for each piece. Seemingly designed to maximise tea break time for the TV audience at home (the whole Prom was broadcast live, and is still available on the BBC iPlayer here if you're interested), but all the fannying around completely disrupted the momentum for the live audience.

- The 8ft BBC camera platform plonked in the middle of the Arena >>>>> 
and blocking the stage view for anyone behind it. With a capacity audience, particularly unfair.

- the free Proms pocket guides running out before the concert had even started.

But what about the music? Well, the opening  Festliches Präludium shows Strauss at his least subtle, all banging organ chords and brass fanfares. Bělohlávek conjured up decibels on a Ted Nugent scale. My ears rang. What a start. 

After an eternity of faffing the stage around, the now-drastically pruned orchestra were ready to take on Mozart's Oboe Concerto, with Nick Daniel in the driving seat. A choux puff after Strauss's black forest gateau, it was handled with delicacy and a touch of wit by all concerned. I couldn't help thinking though that for all its charm, it does just go on a bit.

Then came the late sub, the redoubtable Christine Brewer, billowing in on a cloud of white satin and powder blue chiffon. Not many voices can fill the Royal Albert Hall, so the knob masters at the BBC often twiddle up the vocal volume for the benefit of home viewers. But la Brewer chose instead to give her live audience a real performance. She belted out Strauss's Four Last Songs at her impressive full capacity. Subtlety was necessarily in short measure, but her lusciously creamy soprano, capped with a remarkably even vibrato, rang out to the back of the hall.

I know it's Messiaen's anniversary year and all that, but even a diehard fan couldn't complain about the amount of Messiaen on offer at this year's Proms. The first of the many tributes came with a stunning Dieu parmi nous from Wayne Marshall. I could barely see him, bent over between the 9,999 pipes of Britain's second largest organ in his stage-rear eyrie, but the sound was ear-splitting.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard was the evening's final soloist. A rather slight piece of early Beethoven, the B flat Rondo, with orchestra, was followed by Elliot Carter's Caténaires. Written for Aimard, and receiving its UK premiere, it's a tiny twinkling gem, a mad ant dash around the keyboard that displays Aimard's extraordinary skill with line and phrasing (not to mention virtuosity) to the full.

The closer, Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy, was hardly an orgy of sensuous abandon under the dour baton of Bělohlávek, but was at least lively enough to end the evening in the spirit of celebration in which it had begun. And like everything else on this evening, loud.

Incidentally, I was surprised to read a review of the Scriabin in The Guardian, as my friend Lu claims she was sitting right behind its author in the side stalls and he left just before it began. But perhaps it's a case of mistaken identity.

No mistakes about The Times Proms podcast - several of us in the Arena watched discreetly as a couple of Timesers stood in the corner recording this before the concert. So if they say it comes directly from the Proms, it's nothing but the truth. 

 

 

 

World's greatest singer hits Wigmore Hall. Twice !

Matthias Goerne / Pierre Laurent Aimard - Wigmore Hall, 7 and 9 June

Schumann Tief im Herzen trag ich Pein Op. 138 No. 2; Gebet Op. 135 No. 5; Requiem Op. 90 No. 7; Liederkreis Op. 39; Kernerlieder Op. 35

Originally there were different programmes on each of Matthias Goerne and Pierre Laurent Aimard's two nights at the Wigmore Hall. But a message arrived a couple of weeks beforehand - would I like a refund because both nights would now be the same? Would I hellz! The point of going to see Matthias Goerne is that it's *Matthias Goerne*. He can sing the telephone directory for I care. And one day he may even he do that. He's already given us such perplexing evenings as Die Schöne Magelone complete with an extensive narration - in German and his take on the woman's-view cycle Frauenliebe und -leben - a conception dismissed by no less than Fischer-Dieskau as "ridiculous, stupid and wrong" (nope, both were, in their own ways, enthralling and entirely worthwhile).

The programme this time, Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis coupled with the Kernerlieder was staid in comparison. And it was much more conventional in execution. In contrast to Goerne's most recent Wigmore appearances (again, two identical recitals), which were spent largely with his head behind the piano lid, this time he surfaced and pointed audience-wards for most of the evening, making eye contact, acknowledging the presence of life forms beyond the stage. His restless pacing and corkscrewing suggested something, if not quite ease, then at least not the discomfort he can often project. Seated near the front (I've learned from experience the Matthias magic fades with distance) I was completely drawn in.

The awkwardness was left to his accompanist du jour, one of my favourite pianists, Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Uncharacteristically ill at ease, Aimard barely scraped through the first performance, and was little improved for the second. Schumann is a speciality of his, and I've heard him play much more demanding work much better, so I don't know what was going on. But fistfuls of smudged notes and an overreliance on heavy pedalling to smooth and conceal indicated more than just an off night. Whatever was going on, I wish him a speedy recovery.

Aimard's problems may have accounted for the bizarrely lugubrious tempos selected for some of the songs. Or perhaps they were interpretative choices. Whatever, their half-speed Mondnacht is the oddest version I've heard since Barbra Streisand's. And they artistically rearranged my tune (Intermezzo from the Liederkreis)by performing stretches quite out of sync.

But nothing could take away from Goerne's supreme artistry and technique. It's not just that he has possibly the most beautiful voice out there, deep, dry and viscous as a pint of Guinness. Without ever seeming to strain for effect, he can find every nuance in every song and shape it perfectly. He has the chocolatey velvet bass, the lighter floated sound, the full operatic boom, the lot, and it's all intelligently deployed. On the first evening, he (uncharacteristically) pushed a little too hard, took a few too many risks, and was rewarded with the odd cracked or wide note. With a less full-tilt performance on the second, it was all CD-perfect.

The Kernerlieder were the highlight each night, displaying Goerne's ability to look beyond the words as text and find in them what the composer found. The connection between the songs here is a subtle one, more musical and emotional than verbal, and was delicately teased out. It's the musicality that really marks Goerne out from so many of his colleagues.

Despite all this, I sensed not all of the audience were drawn in. On both nights there seemed to be a core of believers (probably the large number who attended both shows) and a residue of perfunctory applauders. These were performances that required a certain level of attention to be fully appreciated - Goerne is hardly an easy sell, and nothing if not subtle - was that the reason? 
 

Boulez at the Barbican

LSO/Boulez - Barbican, 30 April 2008

Bartók's Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion is such a rarity on the London schedules that it's welcome no matter who's performing it.

But having been promised Lang Lang and Hélène Grimaud, I was a little disappointed to find them substituted without warning or explanation by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich. Aimard is a great favourite of mine, he excels in Bartók, and his performance with frequent partner Stefanovich was predictably exemplary. But I still itch to hear what the man who said "If you like hip hop, then you will like Bartók" would have made of it.

The percussion soloists, the LSO's own Neil Percy and Nigel Thomas, were immaculate and unflashy, and Pierre Boulez pulled the whole thing together tautly. If it didn't have the impact of the pared-down Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion from which it is drawn, that's wasn't down to the performance, but to Bartók's sprawling arrangements, which tend to grab ideas out of the hands of the soloists only to lose them in the orchestra. That Boulez got a far warmer reception on his entrance than he did at the end of this piece reflects entirely on the material.

Boulez's thoughtful programme placed more piano work rearranged for orchestra, his own Notations, at the end of the evening.

With orchestration these become almost unrecognisable, expanded in all directions. The tablecloth size of the conductor's score, running at about two bars per massive page judging from the manic speed of Boulez's flipping, evidenced the intricacy of his arrangements.

The orchestra too was massive, extra percussion and all hands on deck, but every detail was crystal clear, and there was all the focus and momentum the Bartók lacked.

Notation II was the brief and explosive finale, reprised scrappily but even more exuberantly as an encore.

In between these blockbusters came Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, sounding almost cosy in Boulez's affectionate reading and Stravinsky's Le Chant du rossignol, light-footed and sparkling, with stunning, perfectly judged flute, violin and trumpet solos.

Boulez returns to the Barbican on 11 May with Michelle De Young for Duke Bluebeard's Castle and Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand - not to be missed.

Studies with Aimard

Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Barbican, 22 May 2007

Should we have been surprised that the Barbican was only half full for one of the world's top pianists - or surprised it was only half empty for a programme based around modern work? And did the noticeable number who left after the all-Schumann first half avoiding the Ligeti-based second - or had they simply had enough? Although Schumann's enormous blocky chords encouraged a soupy blur of over pedalling in places, Aimard otherwise performed his études deftly enough. But it was all rather detached and academic, and didn't he really take off until the triumphantly sparkling final number in the set.

The second half was a painless bit of education. Twinning Ligeti études with thematic counterparts by other composers could have been just heartsinkingly didactic, but it actually worked rather brilliantly. Even without the rather laboured programme notes, it wasn't hard to pick up on the echoes Aimard had found in each pairing. He sounded much more at home with these intelligently-matched selections than the first half's (although he used sheet music here and hadn't for the Schumann) with the final frantic L'Escalier du Diable the highlight.