SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Prokofiev, Swayne, Sibelius: Peter Jablonski (piano), BBC National Orchestra of Wales (Jac van Steen conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 16.11.07 (GPu)

Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No.1
Swayne: Symphony No.1, ‘a small world’
Sibelius: Symphony No.5

The premiere of a new composition by Giles Swayne formed the centrepiece of a thought-provoking concert. Swayne’s First Symphony (I shall resist any temptation to lapse into one of those usually fruitless discussions about terminology – whether the work deserves the designation ‘symphony’, what is a modern symphony etc) proved a substantial piece, made up of three movements and lasting well nigh three quarters of an hour.

Using a large orchestra, with a substantially augmented percussion section, Swayne’s symphony took environmental crisis as its subject. In his programme note, and in a brief, unpretentious (and overly self-deprecatory) address to the audience, the composer explained his programme. The long first movement is intended as an expression of Swayne’s anger at man’s despoliation of the natural world. It carries the title ‘The dogs of war’ – an allusion to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – “Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war”, the invitation to rape and pillage extended to a victorious army. Aggressively jagged music embodies the human destruction of the environment, the toppling over into violence and destructiveness of the human impulse to know, understand and control nature. The massed drums (the score calls for seven percussionists) begin the movement relatively quietly, but become more assertive as the movement proceeds. The movement is constructed in two parts, the second a loosely palindromic reversal of the first, save that the drums (supplemented by the sound of an anvil) become more and more dominant as the movement moves towards its conclusion.

The second movement (bearing a title ‘Silent Spring’ – which alludes to Rachel Carson’s famous book of 1962, a foundation stone of the modern environmental movement) is built on an attractive (and powerful) musical conceit. Carson famously wrote of a spring without birdsong. Swayne’s movement begins with a musical allusion to a richly voiced dawn chorus, created by the interweaving voices of seventeen solo instruments and sustained by pizzicato strings. Gradually a rather saccharine waltz intrudes; some of the solo instruments fall silent; the rest attempt a repetition of their bird-like chorus; the waltz returns, louder and lengthier, on several more occasions; at each visitation it silences more of the ‘natural’ voices, until all are dumb. Or, if not quite dumb, capable only of the briefest of exploratory utterances; seven such utterances are attempted; each is savagely and abruptly cut short by a curt explosion from the orchestra, like so many shots or blows of the axe.

In the third movement (‘Threnody’) a single piccolo – Swayne imagined it, he tells us, as the last bird singing its heart out in a dead landscape – states the initial materials. The ensuing variations have an elegiac quality, some of them decidedly haunting, with some attractive and powerful writing for the lower strings and the brass. Sustained notes in the strings evolve into a kind of grotesque universal funeral march, and the movement eventually subsides into an eerie silence, emerging from a final percussive resonance.

There were many fine passages in this Symphony and its ‘argument’ (as much extra-musical as musical) was at times quite compelling. It is notoriously difficult to make a judgement of a new work at a single hearing (and without sight of a score), but for what it is worth, the first movement seemed somewhat inflated and overlong. In being longer than it perhaps needed to be, this movement diluted some of its best ideas (and perhaps even dissipated some of the anger which drove it). The frequent reiteration of ideas seemed to make the error of confusing insistent repetition with persuasiveness; at the same time, the sheer length of this first movement disturbed the proportions of the whole, and came close to making the second and third movements feel like supplementary afterthoughts. The relative brevity of the two later movements was in many respects more impressive and more persuasive – and also more moving.

There were moments throughout all three movements when the music became rather static, when one sensed that more impetus was needed. Without a score, or comparative performances, it is impossible to be sure how far this was Swayne’s intention and how far it was the result of the orchestra (and conductor) making understandably tentative progress through the work's complexities. For the most part, however, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales played this Radio 3 Commission with conviction, attack and subtlety. While not finding the work entirely convincing, I was certainly glad to have heard it – readers may like to know that the concert is scheduled for broadcast on Radio 3 on the 23^rd of November.

After the interval Jac van Steen (often at his best in the work of this composer) conducted a stirring performance of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony. Particularly when heard in succession to Swayne’s Symphony, Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony evokes a different, earlier relationship between man and nature. If one describes it as late romantic, it is so in a usage of the word which refers as much (or more) to areas of sensibility and philosophy as to those of musical history. After its evocative and tonally beautiful opening the music conveys a rich (and quietly happy) sense of burgeoning vitality, of newly efflorescent energy. Much of the movement has something of spring about it, building to a climax of great rapidity and dynamism. Metaphors of seeds and growth come inescapably to one’s mind in trying to verbalise this movement, I find. We have Sibelius’ own testimony to the role of the natural world in the work’s final movement. In a diary entry dated April 21^st, 1915 Sibelius records that:

...Today at ten to eleven I saw 16 swans. One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, what beauty! … Their call, the same woodwind type as that of cranes, but without tremolo. The swan-call closer to the trumpet … A low-pitched refrain reminiscent of a small child crying. Nature mysticism and life’s Angst! The Fifth Symphony’s finale-theme: legato in the trumpets!

The symphony as a whole assumes a relationship between man and nature quite different from that which (necessarily) underlies Swayne’s Symphony. Sibelius can contemplate the natural world without feeling a share in communal human guilt. For Sibelius, nature is a mirror in which man sees himself, or sees himself as he might be; for us, and for Swayne, it is a mirror which returns an increasingly disturbing image to our gaze.

Jac van Steen seemed thoroughly at home with this music and the performance had an assurance and a visible and audible passion that gripped from beginning to end.

The programme had begun with a performance of Prokofiev’s youthful first Piano Concerto. In retrospect it seemed an odd prelude to what followed. This is urban music par excellence, the music of man in society, rather man considering himself and nature. If there are any birds to be heard here, they are, to put it in Yeatsian terms, more like the artificial birds of ‘Byzantium’ than the “nine-and-fifty birds” of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’. The concerto has an oddly disjunctive quality, lyricism by the side of percussive hammering, the whole sometimes approaching the febrile. Peter Jablonski was at his very best in the cadenza which introduces the recapitulation. His work was fluent throughout; the more percussive passages were played without overstatement or exaggeration and in the more lyrical passages he found an appropriate poetry. Some of Prokofiev’s writing for strings elicited some particularly fine playing from the orchestra. But somehow the whole never quite took off; this was a good, rather than a special performance. It was surpassed, in interest and excitement, by what followed it.


Glyn Pursglove

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