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Rachmaninov, Stravinsky: Nelson Goerner (piano), BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Thierry Fischer (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 3.10.2008 (GPu)

Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto No.3
Stravinsky, The Firebird – complete


The beautifully shaped and played phrases of the opening of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto immediately gave one the feeling that the BBC National Orchestra of Wales was on particularly good form and the remainder of the concert bore out that initial confidence. The programme was made up of two substantial works, both Russian in origin and written only a year apart: 1909 for the Rachmaninov, 1910 for the Stravinsky). The Rachmaninov concerto was written for performance in New York, the composer giving the premiere with the New York Symphony Orchestra, under Walter Damrosch on November 28^th, 1909. Stravinsky’s ballet was premuiered at the Paris Opéra on June 25, 1910, conducted by Gabriel Pierné. The juxtaposition of the two made for a fascinating evening.

Rachmaninov’s grandeur of gesture, especially where the soloist is concerned, and perhaps the regularity with which he himself played the concerto, for a long time tended to encourage audiences to view it as a vehicle for virtuoso pianism rather than an intregrated composition. While the Argentinian pianist Nelson Goerner was certainly well able to handle the technical demands of the piano part, and presented us with some beautifully rippling runs and some percussive, declamatory playing, one never had the sense that there was any mere display going on. Resisting any temptation to draw attention to his own brilliance (this was definitely not pianism à la Lang Lang), Goerner’s work was fully integrated into a sense of the work seen nad heard whole – there was non sense, as there can be with this concerto, of an orchestra merely ‘accompanying’ a soloist. The clarity of Thierry Fischer’s conducting, and the orchestra’s response to it, ensured that the interrelationships which bind together most of the materials in the first movement were clearly audible, and Goerner’s eloquent and lucid work played its part in bringing out the coherence of the movement. I remember reading somewhere comments made by the critic Grigory Prokofiev after the Moscow premiere of the work in April of 1910, when he wrote of the works “sincerity, clarity and simplicity of musical thought”. These are not the qualities which have always been uppermost in later renditions of the work, but they were the dominant impressions one took away from this particular performance. The opening of the Adagio was especially beautiful, the playing of the woodwinds (here and elsewhere) a particular joy. Pianist and conductor alike were again striking in the clarity with which they elucidated the shape of the movement, intimate attention to detail never being allowed to muddy larger questions of form. The lucid honesty of Nelson Goerner’s playing conveyed a real sense of thought and feeling, rather than the glossy pre-packaged oratory that this movement can sometimes elicit from pianists. The playing of the woodwinds was a particular delight in this second movement. In the Finale energy levels were high, but not merely frantic or frenetic, the tempos being well judged, even if the central series of episodes ran the risk of seeming rather shapeless before the emergence of the closing heroic triumph. Perhaps here one did miss some of the sheer self assertiveness of some performances, but the colours were certainly resplendent and Goerner’s work, particularly at the lower end of the keyboard, was unflamboyantly persuasive. Overall this may not have been as dazzling as performances of the work sometimes are, but it made out a very eloquent case for the musical virtues which the concerto possesses and on which valuable light was thrown by there not being any attempt to play it as a kind of glorified competition piece.

The first half’s performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto was good; the second half’s Firebird was quite outstanding. It was, in short, one of the finest performances I have heard the BBC National Orchestra of Wales give in recent years. Both precise and evocative, exceptionally transparent in texture where it needed to be, rich and full elsewhere, this was a magical reading of a remarkable score. This full 1910 score of The Firebird is hugely more impressive, more overwhelming, than the any of the orchestral suites which the composer later extracted and rearranged from it. The scope of the work is enormous and the musical interest and inventiveness are such that it is well capable of sustaining the listener’s interest without the benefit of stage action – especially when performed as well as this. Thierry Fischer’s subtle gradations of volume and tempo throughout were beautifully calibrated, the dialogue between solo instruments and between instrumental sections, often very witty (in wholly serious fashion) were presented with exemplary sense of style and purpose. From the opening darkness, rich in fairy tale danger, the diabolus in musica in the lower strings, all that followed seemed to grow with organic inevitability. The echoes of Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin (and others) are real, but handled with a respectful wit which is part of the pleasure of this ceaselessly inventive score. The Firebird’s Dance was ravishing in its glittering orchestration, evidently relished by Fischer and the orchestra, and the Firebird’s yearning pleas for release after her capture were beautifully stylised, ‘humanised’ to a point without ever leaving the realm of folk-tale and myth. The music of the Enchanted Princesses had a delicate playfulness with just the right tinge of sentimentality and the horn solo which announced the entrance of Prince Ivan was suitably heroic. The solo oboe in the Khorovod, drawing as it does on a genuine Russian folk song (which Stravinsky may have known from its appearance in a collection edited by Rimsky-Korsakov) was exquisite in the suppleness of its phrasing, the piece collapsing into an evocation of the love (and first kiss) of Princess Unearthly-Beauty and Prince Ivan. After the trumpet calls (taking us back to the diabolus in musica) we needed no stage action, such was the panache of the orchestral playing, to be aware of the presence of the multitude of slave girls and monsters, soldiers, fiends and magicians (chief of them Kastchei). Whether in the whirling rhythms or savagely accented rhythms of some of the later dances, or in the pointillist and Ravellian delicacy and subtlety of some of the orchestral evocations of beauty and love or, for that matter, the soaring grandeur of the closing music triumph, this was a marvellous reading, a constant stimulation to the reader’s imagination. By turns joyous and ominous, haunting and fierce, ethereal and infernal, heroic and tender, Stravinsky’s score was performed with conviction and passion. It rightly received a fiercely enthusiastic response from the audience in the hall. The concert was being recorded for future broadcast on radio 3. If the sound engineer’s do justice to it, it will be a concert well worth catching.

Glyn Pursglove

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