SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Turnage, Henze, Brahms and Tchaikovsky: Christian Tetzlaff (violin)   London Philharmonic Orchestra. Vladimir Jurowski (conductor), Royal Festival Hall, 2.2. 2008 (GD)

Mark-Anthony Turnage: Lullaby for Hans (London Premiere)
Hans Werner Henze: Second Sonata per archi
Brahms: Violin Concerto in D
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No 6 in B minor (Pathetique)


Jurowski has received much critical acclaim in his recent appointment as Principal conductor of the LPO. The LPO’s publicity machine has even been comparing this recent partnership with the vintage years when Beecham (the orchestra’s founder) was at the helm. And as I said in a recent review of the LPO under Adam Fischer, the orchestra in its present form is indeed capable of some superb playing. This concert opened with the premiere of a short but well crafted string composition by Mark-Anthony Turnage, who is currently receiving a round of performances from conductor and orchestra as the LPO’s Composer in Residence. Lullaby for Hans was written to commemorate Henze’s 80^th birthday. Henze has been  a friend and mentor throughout Turnage's career and this short, rather lilting piece for strings was re-worked and extended from a short piano-piece. The lullaby mood of the piece is interrupted by two brief passages of faster, more agitated music : the coda however subsides into a mood of calm resolution. For the two main works Jurowski wisely used antiphonal placing of violins; more unusually he placed the violas to his left, behind the first violins, and celli to his right, behind the second violins. Double basses were raised on the right. But as far as orchestral balance was concerned the results were  convincing.

The opening work was well complimented by the Henze Second Sonata for Strings. This beautifully composed and contrasted piece dates from 1993 and is in three movements lasting just under ten minutes. It was inspired by the strings of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. I heard shades of Hindemith, Stravinsky, even Alban Berg but  the piece had an an economic elegance all it’s own. Jurowski and the orchestra played these two contrasted and related string pieces with great subtlety and dynamic/lyrical finesse. Especially notable, in the Henze work, were some excellently phrased contributions from solo violin and cello. I am not sure that the two opening contemporary pieces worked very well as a prelude to two standard works from the classical repertory. Their style and tone would have contrasted better in a complete contemporary programme. But organisers are still reluctant to programme all contemporary concerts for fear of half empty halls.

Christian Tetzlaff sounded a tad harsh in his opening statement in the Brahms Violin Concerto. He seemed to be trying to emulate a tonal  grandeur which did not quite come off,  too often sounding forced rather than noble.  This was not helped by Jurowski’s very close attention to specific orchestral details in the opening tutti, at the expense of  maintaining an overall line contrasting the lyrical with the dramatic. The whole of the first movement simply failed to hang together, the problem being exacerbated by a rather ponderous initial tempo choice. (The actual tempo marking is ‘Allegro non troppo’). I certainly missed the suberb lyrical flow and contrast here of a Milstein or Oistrakh and the assured structural coherence of a Klemperer or a Monteux.

Despite a beautifully phrased opening oboe solo,  the problem of musical balance between soloist and orchestra persisted in the F major ‘Adagio’.  Tetzlaff’s rather edgy, even strident tone, contrasting in the wrong way with the quite hushed quality Jurowski achieved especially in the cantabile orchestral string line. Just a  bar into the finale and Tetzlaff broke a string. He was a good couple of minutes restringing. After this initial lapse the finale sounded a shade overheated and orchestrally rather scrambled,  particularly at the beginning of the coda. The subtle dynamic gradations on timpani just before the coda were not sufficiently rhythmically pointed as they should be. Tetzlaff played Joachim’s classic cadenza in the first movement. After the Brahms,  Tetzlaff played as an encore a pleasingly flexible and fluid performance of the ‘Largo’ from Bach’s C major Sonata for solo violin.

I was anticipating Jurowski’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s last symphony with some enthusiasm. How ‘Russian’ would his ‘Pathetique’ sound? Jurowski is the son of Mikhail Jurowski and received a musical training in Moscow. The Russian performances of the ‘Pathetique’ I have heard on record from Mravinsky, Kondrashin, Golovanov and Temirkanov, all with Russian orchestras, are all very different interpretatively, but they all emphasise the almost frenetic, dramatic power, and darkness of the music in a way not often found in Western performances. From this perspective Jurowski’s rendition was something of a disappointment,  being distinctively underpowered and not sufficiently dramatic. However that having been said, this performance did have some merits of its own, not least some fine playing from the LPO.

The lugubrious opening which takes us from E minor to the home tonic of B minor, was managed well with some eloquent bassoon contributions. Jurowski phrased the initial Allegro on violas in a curiously legato style; although the score clearly indicates that the notes of each phrase should be detached. By the time we came to the great D major string melody,  I felt a lack of line and connection with the opening material, although Jurowski played the melody in a relatively rubato-free style as indicated. Although the dying-away theme on the clarinet was beautifully phrased it didn’t sufficiently register the ppppp the composer asks for as one of the most dramatic dynamic contrasts to the ff crash which initiates the development section. The vast contrasting vicissitudes of the development - including the solemn brass chorale from the Russian Orthodox Mass of the Dead, and the veritably ‘Wotan’ like huge descending scale with the ffff timpani crescendo -  all sounded well articulated/played, but all crucially lacked that almost unbearable sense of universal tragedy that one hears in the greatest performances. Also,  at the height of the drama when the mood is intensified by ff trumpets, trombones and tuba  in dramatic canon,  the balance favoured the trombones over the trumpets. But this might have been partially due to the Festival Hall's rather restricted, opaque sounding acoustic.

The ‘Allegro con grazia’ second movement ‘waltz’ was strangely inelegant, completely lacking a sense of the ‘grazia’. Jurowski’s phrasing here was peculiarly four-square. There was no sense of the five-four time signature juxtaposing with the two-four and three-four bar. The very Slavonic sounding trio with its ostinato pedal-point on timpani simply failed to register; the timpani beat and its carefully marked dynamic levels of gradation were barely audible!

The ‘gigantic march’ (Tovey) which constitutes the third movement,  started off quite well but later became occasionally rhythmically slack especially in the swirling cross-rhythms between string and woodwind , just before the march proper, and at the ‘sempre fff’ close. For the main tutti march itself Jurowski speeded up considerably where no acceleration of tempo is asked for. This diminished the accumulative affect of the whole movement; the march itself sounding rather rushed and underpowered.

The final ‘Adagio lamentoso’ was played straight through in a rather bland manner. The great hymn-like threnody of the finale’s main theme had no sense of the solemn almost ghostly aspect one encounters in Mravinksy’s classic rendition. The great surging climax which ‘resolves’ itself in a closing lament in B minor, again was well contoured and played,  but lacked that crucial ambiguous sense of resolve mixed with catastrophe, which again  in a great performance,  takes on the status of a universal (not just personal) catastrophic tragedy. Tchaikovsky’s subtle and discreet incorporation of a single stroke on the gong initiating the final lament; ‘the most ominous sound in the orchestra’ for Tovey, sounded rather intrusive and indiscreet tonight. This was was not helped by the unfortunate extra-musical intrusion of a mobile ring-tone. What a moment to mix the banal with the sublime!

Geoff Diggines

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