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Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn: Michael Collins (clarinet), Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Kenneth Sillito (director)  St. David’s Hall, Cardiff 8.11.07 (GPu)

Beethoven, Overture, Coriolan, Op.62

Mozart, Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra in A, K.622

Mozart, Divertimento in D major, K.136

Haydn, Synphony No.104 in D major (London)

In less than a lifetime the music played and thought of as embodying the history of western music has increased enormously, thanks to a variety of phenomena – from the early music movement, developments in modern musicology to the explosion of the repertoire that came with the CD, etc. It is still good, however, to have an evening in the concert hall exclusively devoted to the music that for so long held an almost exclusive place as, as it were, the ‘definition’ of western ‘classical’ music – the music of the great ‘classical’ composers of Austria and Germany.

Since its foundation in 1958 (the first concert was given in the London church from which it takes its name in November 1959) under the leadership of Neville Marriner, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields has had the music of Mozart near the heart of its life and work. This pleasing programme presented two works by Mozart flanked – in anti-chronological fashion – by a Beethoven overture and a Haydn symphony.

Playing on modern instruments, but in a manner well-informed by ‘authentic’ practice, the Academy is one of our most persuasive and fluent interpreters of the classical repertoire. They bring to their work a wealth of understanding and idiomatic ease, an assured unity of ensemble and that attractive air created by a small orchestra in which each musician actually seems to be listening to his/her companions. Just occasionally there is perhaps a little too much English politeness or understatement about their work. The Beethoven overture which opened the programme was perhaps a case in point. Their reading of the Coriolan Overture of 1807 began with finely accented phrasing, with overtones of both menace and nobility. But in the later climax one missed the elemental power that the very best performances of this piece elicit. It isn’t just a matter of scale, of size of orchestra; the lyrical beauty of the second theme was much more persuasive than the stormier more intense passages and this seemed to reflect a particular, if slightly limiting, vision of the music. There is more grim intensity in the overture than the academy found in it on this particular occasion.

If the opening was very slightly disappointing, the ensuing performance of Mozart’s clarinet concerto quickly transformed the mood. This was an unqualified delight, a performance both authoritative and relaxed. I was reminded of an observation of Ezra Pound’s, in his ABC of Reading: “Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music”. This performance of the clarinet concerto was never in danger of any kind of rottenness, never in danger of straying too far from the dance. The orchestral playing throughout was springy and supportive, soloist and orchestra utterly convincing partners in a dialogue – or dance. The excellent Michael Collins is something of a terpsichorean performer, swaying and stepping to the rhythms of the music and his spirit was infectious. Long phrases and complicated runs were negotiated with seeming ease and exemplary breath control, and without the slightest hint of mere showiness. Knowledge that the concerto was completed in the last year of Mozart’s life has led to a deal of stress on its supposedly valedictory or autumnal qualities, to its possession of a pervasive air of resignation. It will bear such readings, but how refreshing to hear a performance which put much greater emphasis on the sheer vivacity of the work, on its bubbling inventiveness. Even the adagio, as interpreted by Collins and the ASMF, didn’t forget to dance, its heavier weight of string tone not precluding a certain élan, the very silences poised for the next gesture, the next dance step. Though they never trivialised the beauty of the adagio, nor ignored the sadness implicit in many of its phrases, Collins and the ASMF never allowed the music to feel excessively sorry for itself as some performers do. The final allegro was a delightful dance, an affirmation of inventiveness and energy, but shot through with moments of reflection and deeper thought. This is music, indeed, in which thinking and dancing exist in a kind of perfect symmetry – a quality which this performance caught to perfection.

After the interval the strings of the ASMF played the three movement of K.136, a Divertimento in D written in 1772. Given the fluid terminology applied to the orchestral music of this time, one might as profitably think of it as a kind of three movement Italian sinfonia as a divertimento. The central andante of K.136, indeed, is particularly italianate in manner. All three movements received performances characterised by impeccable ensemble work and (once again) the dance was never too far away. The opening allegro was played with gorgeous lightness of touch and the andante benefited from careful attention to matters of structure and shape; there was a real sense that this relatively slight music had been interiorised, that it was played with love and affection; any sense of the merely routine was very far away. This was evident too in the way in which the third movement was played with beautifully judged attack and in which the orchestra engaged – with a kind of playful respect – with that movement’s fugue.

The programme’s closing piece, Haydn’s Symphony 104 brought the rest of the orchestra back on stage and the grandeur of the ensuing performance (an entirely apt grandeur quite without pomposity or mere rhetoric) made a striking contrast with the intimacy of the Divertimento which preceded it. The fanfare opening summoned the attention, called on a new cast of mind, as it were, and everything that followed held the attention very persuasively. The orchestral work was marked by a rewarding transparency of sound; here as elsewhere the grace and crispness, the precisely controlled dynamics, of the strings perhaps most obviously strike the listener, but it would be unfair to neglect praise of the other sections of the orchestra too. This was a Haydn of contrasts and surprises, of large statement and, almost simultaneously, of accessible intimacy. The orchestra at this performance was actually rather smaller than that available to Haydn at the first performance at the King’s Theatre in London on the 4^th of May 1795. One or two of the fortissimo passages may perhaps have been on the light side, inevitably, but the delicacies of much of Haydn’s writing in this symphony are not always heard in a performance of such sympathetic (and unsentimental) clarity. In the slow movement the movement away from and back to G major could be heard and wondered at with particular delight. Haydn’s sublime civility is heard at something like its highest in this andante, and the ASMF did it full justice. The dance of the minuet was quietly – but genuinely – festive and, as throughout the programme one was made to feel, very compellingly, that this was music making with a real sense of community and conversation. The same sense of sublimated dance (and folk song) underlay the affirmative energy of the closing allegro spiritoso, in which musical sophistication and folk roots came together seamlessly, making the movement quintessentially Haydenesque. A splendid concert closer.

The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, when on such good form, continues to make a very convincing case for the conductorless chamber orchestra. Much credit for that must go, no doubt, to Kenneth Sillito, as director (as well as to the evident commitment and musical intelligence of the individual members of the orchestra). His input – and the band’s capacity to respond to it – ensured a concert which reminded one why this repertoire remains central.


Glyn Pursglove

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