SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Brahms, Janáček : Stephen Hough (piano), BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Libor Pešek (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 12.01.08 (GPu)

Brahms, Piano Concerto No.1
Janáček, Sinfonietta


Advertisements for this concert used the slogan ‘Darkness and Light’ to describe the relationship between the two works. Well, yes – and no. Certainly the two works make an interesting pair and stand in antithesis to one another in a number of ways – but (as, is no doubt to be expected from the language of advertising) ‘darkness’ and ‘light’ express the polarities too absolutely.

The Brahms concerto is the work of a young composer – Brahms was 25 when he completed it - the Janáček Sinfonietta that of a man in his sixties; this is a piece written two years before the composer’s death, even if Janáček was a man rejuvenated, in more ways than one, at the time of its composition. Brahms’ concerto traverses a troubled and complex emotional landscape and finishes up in a very different place from its beginning; much in its structure and texture, its superficial generic confusion, embodies the difficulties (and complexities) of its creation. Janáček’s Sinfonietta, musically speaking, finishes up back where it started, with the return of the fanfare which opened it, and the music speaks of immense facility and assurance (in contrast to the ‘amateurism’ Brahms is said to have detected in his own concerto). If one looks to relate the concerto to its human and social context, the relevant facts include Schumann’s attempted suicide and imprisonment in an asylum and the ambiguities of Brahms’s feelings towards Clara Schumann; undertake the same kind of exercise (an appropriate word in this context) with the Sinfonietta and one finds oneself talking about a festival of gymnastics, or about Janáček’s experience of hearing military bands. Brahms’s concerto is essentially introspective, ‘personal’ music; Janáček’s Sinfonietta is very much public music, celebratory, an affirmation of the value of (in Janáček’s own words) “contemporary man’s … courage, strength and determination to fight for victory”. Janáček gives the listener extramusical clues in the form of titles for each of the five movements: ‘Fanfares’, ‘The Castle’, ‘The Queen’s Monastery’, ‘The Street’ and ‘The Town Hall’. Whether or not one finds these titles  very useful (I never have) it is undeniable that they point to a social and quotidian  dimension of meaning and reference which is quite specific. Brahms, on the other hand, supplied only, in his autograph score, the words ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’ written beneath the violin/viola theme in the opening bars of the second movement. Critics and scholars have, ever since, been arguing about the application of the text, and what light it might (or might not) throw on the ‘meaning’ of the work. So, two works in many ways very different from one another.

On this particular evening there was, to my mind, no doubt as to which work came off best. Brahms’s concerto got a very fine performance indeed, a performance richly responsive to the emotional and moral profundity of the work – and, indeed, to the relative ambiguities of its emotional and moral meanings. Stephen Hough’s reading of the concerto was consistently impressive and searching, and the orchestra, undemonstratively and unfussily conducted by Libor Pešek made itself an entirely fitting partner. The drama of the orchestral opening, ominous, anxious and stormy, was very well articulated and Hough established his authority immediately at his first entry. The initial calmness of the solo voice, seeming, for a time at least, to moderate the troubled passions expressed by the orchestra, was marvellous in pace and effect. Hough’s playing – at this stage and, indeed, throughout – was beautifully lyrical; soloist and conductor chose some relatively slow tempi at times, but their poise and clarity sustained line and phrase perfectly. Nor was Hough found wanting in the recapitulation, picking up and forcefully declaring the theme that had opened the movement. The shifts of mood in this huge first movement here sounded not manic, as they sometimes can, but rather the dignified and merited ambiguities of a complex mind refusing (or unable to accept) any kind of simplicity or stability for very long. The adagio, surely one of the loveliest of all in Brahms’ orchestral output, was played with absolute innerness, with a profound grace and spirituality. After the mental turbulence of the opening movement it was, at times, as if all physical activity had ceased; this is music in which, in a sense, so little happens and so much is. Hough played with a kind of immense gentleness, altogether unsentimental but full of sentiment and the work of the orchestra, especially the strings, was of a similarly high standard. Pešek’s conducting here was a model of its kind, supportive and responsive in equal measure. After the almost ego-less, almost unbodied, music of the adagio, the third movement is the music of activity; here it was full of bustling energy, full of assertion. This – embodied by the resonant trumpet entry – was very much music, and playing, which had a sense of direction and purpose, as if a decision had been taken, after the contradictions and self-questioning of the first movement and the withdrawn near-stillness of the second. Hough played with powerful attack in the relevant passages of this movement and, again, the orchestra was heard at its very best. As he always seems to do, Pešek served the music intelligently and perceptively, without excess or self-aggrandizing histrionics. Overall this was an outstanding performance of a concerto which often seems not to be celebrated as richly as it deserves.

After the interval, Janáček’ Sinfonietta was played with all the understanding one might expect from a conductor of Pešek’s background, even if the energy seemed to flag just once or twice. Certainly the very Slavic pathos of the third movement was captured to perfection – Pešek’s reading was particularly satisfying here – and the Moravian folk elements in the fourth movement were more prominent than sometimes. There were plenty of churning rhythms, and some finely acidic orchestral colours in a performance which brought out very well that sense of exterior space which is so striking a feature of the Sinfonietta. The work’s structure – a kind of recessed arch, the opening and closing fanfares and the andante second movement and allegretto fourth, standing either side of the central movement’s relative melancholy and relative introspection – was very effectively articulated. Yet for all the merits of the performance, and this was a good if not brilliant performance, it was hard not to feel that this second half of the concert was a minor anti-climax. The Sinfonietta is music densely worked, music very well made – and it makes a very good noise! But, after the profundities of the Brahms concerto, I have to confess (and I am surprised to find myself saying it) that the Sinfonietta felt relatively lightweight, somehow slightly empty of real gravity of meaning. A shame; it’s a piece I genuinely like, but it was, to invert the advertiser’s slogan for this concert, rather put into the shadows by the Brahms.


Glyn Pursglove

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