SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Prom 27,  Messiaen Stravinsky Benjamin and Ravel :  BBC Symphony Orchestra George Benjamin (conductor) Carolin Widmann (violin) Royal Albert Hall 6.8.2008 (GD)

Messiaen:   L’Ascension
Stravinsky: Violin Concerto
George Benjamin:  Ringed by the Flat Horizon
Ravel:  Pavane Pour une Infante Defunte; Bolero.


George Benjamin is still relatively neglected both as a composer and a conductor. His 2001 ‘Palimpsests’ is one of the most strikingly distinctive orchestral works from a British composer in recent times. He is also a very skilled conductor especially in his own work and other modern repertoire but also uin French music as was demonstrated tonight in the Ravel pieces.
 
This Prom opened with Messiaen’s 1933 ‘Le’Ascension’ which the composer transposed for the organ the following year. The young Benjamin studied with Messiaen in Paris and the older composer's influence can be heard particularly in Benjamin’s earlier work.  Because of this  I was expecting some compelling Messiaen but  I was initially a little disppointed with the opening ‘The Majesty of Christ’ scored for brass and woodwinds. It was played in a rather perfunctory manner and the BBC orchestra's brass and woodwind intonation left a lot to be desired: too little rehearsal time? The rapturous tones of ‘Serene Hallelujahs’ and ‘Hallelujah on the Trumpet’ sounded much better even though the strings sounded a little rough at times; not quite capturing that combination of sensuality and religious (Catholic) mysticism unique to Messiaen. I remember hearing a San Francisco Symphony broadcast recording with the veteran Pierre Monteux from 1948 which really engaged with the sonority and musical rhetoric of this piece in a way tonight's performance didn’t begin to approach.

Stravinsky’s 1931 violin concerto, written for the young Russian violinist Samuel Dushkin who gave the premiere, is in the baroque manner of Bach. Stravinsky openly stated that he disliked the big standard ‘romantic’ violin concerti of Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelsshon but  this has not stopped various violinists and conductors from overlaying the work with quite alien emotional rhetoric. Tonight Miss Widmann gave a mostly very competent reading. At times, especially in the opening ‘Toccata’, she didn’t quite manage the complex dialectic between rhythmic clusters and the slightly off-pitch folk inflections the composer asks for. Here,  Issac Stern (who accompanied the composer's later recording of the concerto) and more recently Mullova, sound far more confident with this idiom. The two central ‘arias’ sounded quite well, as did the concluding ‘capriccio’, but again Widmann too often missed the developing dynamic/rhythmic inflections and the sense of contrast and improvisation so essential here. All this was not helped by Benjamin's accompaniment which from the opening string pizzicato figuration lacked the essential rhythmic agility. Also the brass and woodwind frequently played too loudly. Once again moments of messy orchestral ensemble suggested a lack of adequate rehearsal time.

Benjamin composed ‘Ringed by the Flat Horizon’ in 1979 and it was first performed at a Prom in 1980. Boulez later conducted the work in London and elsewhere in 1988. Benjamin has speculated that this full scale orchestral piece invokes a vast landscape; actual or mental I wonder,  in which the flat horizon is a metaphor for an approaching storm. Benjamin used a passage from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land as a motive for the work's rhetorical tonality. It is quite amazing that the composer was only 19 when he composed this complex piece, although I don’t think it is too productive to take his  rhetorical inspiration too literally. The literary note can better act as a suggestion for the various moods the music might invoke. This is certainly not programme music and can just as well be heard as a musical discourse in its own right.

The quality of the playing here, despite a few rough string entries, was mostly exemplary suggesting a more generous rehearsal schedule than that allotted to the earlier works in the programme. The work is scored for a large orchestra with a complex array of percussion instruments and lasts for just over twenty minutes. Messiaen’s influence is felt at the very opening,  in the plangent woodwind figurations and later in the brass. There are also later shades of Schoenberg’s Op 31 and elements from Webern make themselves heard as do later serial techniques and even some Debussy-like harmonies in the the more contemplative middle section. There a solo cello figure interweaves in and out of the complex clusters of orchestral sonority. But even here Benjamin is never engaging in any kind of compositional amalgam or bricolage of various influences.The way he deploys an idea from (say) Schoenberg is always an incorporation, or a semblance, which integrates very much into Benjamin’s own musical discursive framework. Benjamin never quotes directly from another composer, rather  rather makes various judicious allusions to other musical compositional styles. I have not heard Boulez’s rendition of the piece, but I can’t imagine the composer's own being bettered. Of special note was the very subtle use of percussion,  especially in the arch-like contour of the ‘storm’ section; evocative of a storm but never degenerating into sensational effect or musical onomatopoeia.

The concluding two works by Ravel were both given very unmannered but effective readings and again the orchestra seemed in fine form, more thouroughly rehearsed. Benjamin caught to near perfection the gentle lilt and very subtle tone of sadness the ‘Pavane pour une infante defunte’ invokes. Ravel was later scathingly critical of the piece seeing it as too much influenced by Chabrier, and weakly constructed, when in fact the work seemed tonight a model of economy and textural contrast in its graceful rondo form.

Ravel was equally dismissive of ‘Bolero’ as ‘containing no music’! He approved of someone in the audience shouting ‘Rubbish’ at the premiere, and couldn’t understand why Ansermet performed it so much. He would have had no idea how popular the piece would later become - it is still used in adverts and films. Despite Ravel’s dismissive remarks,  he did make a recording of ‘Bolero’ in 1932 with the Lamoureux orchestra. And no conductor since as far as I know,  has realized the dark, almost menacing tread of this of study in orchestral crescendo. Tonight Benjamin played it safe,  taking the work straight through at one steady but not too slow tempo. The changing melodic lines and orchestral colours were all finely realized with some thrilling brass glissandi at the work's climactic coda. Maybe here and there,  I would have welcomed a tad more imagination in the phrasing of the various solo woodwind and horn figures and overall perhaps Benjamin was a little too literal and straight. Nor did I hear any of the menace the composer evinced from Bolero, but then few of the hundreds of subsequent performances/recordings quite achieve what the composer does. In its own terms as a Prom performance, this was about as good as it gets.

Geoff Diggines


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