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Swansea Festival 2008: Mozart, Karl Jenkins, Vaughan Williams, Elgar; John Alley (piano), Gareth Davies (flute), Andrew Haverson (violin), Neil Percy (percussion), London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Colin Davies (conductor), Karl Jenkins (conductor in Quirk), Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, 4.10.2008 (GPu)

Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D, K504 (Prague)
Karl Jenkins, Quirk
Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending
Elgar, Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma)


This concert opened the sixtieth year of the Swansea Festival, which has run continuously since its establishment in 1948. Over those sixty years it has hosted many of the leading orchestras from Britain and abroad and has featured a roll call of distinguished conductors and soloists. In the same building which contains the Brangwyn Hall, the George Hall is hosting a small exhibition which illustrates some aspects of the Festival’s history and some of the many stars who have performed there – Beecham, Boult, Victoria de los Angeles and many, many more of later vintages too. A nice symmetry was effected by this opening concert – Elgar’s Enigma Variations (conducted by Sir Adrian Boult) opened the very first concert programme back in 1948, and here they were closing a concert sixty years later.

This concert opened, however, with Mozart’s Prague Symphony, K 504. Sir Colin Davis is, of course, a very distinguished Mozartean and this was a performance as good and intelligent as one had expected. Amongst Mozart’s symphonies this is one in which analogies with the operas loom particularly large – with, for example, the slow introduction anticipating the music of the Commendatore’s statue in Don Giovanni (to be written in the months following the premiere of the symphony), the fashion in which the theme of the allegro which follows seems to anticpate the overture to Don Giovanni and the way that the beginning of the first theme of the Presto echoes the duet of Cherubino and Susanna in the second act of The Marriage of Figaro. In a broader sense too it has things in common with the great operas, in the way in which a superficial ease of sentiment masks great profundities not far beneath the surface. As experienced a man of the theatre as Sir Colin Davis fittingly gave us a properly dramatic account of the symphony, making the most of the dynamic contrasts (without any exaggeration) in the adagio introduction and giving a quasi-vocal quality (certainly a deep sense of human dialogue) to the rich interplay of emotions in the central Andante, capturing perfectly the changing moods of that lovely movement, taken with confident and assured slowness. The third movement, too, had an intimate sense of emotion amidst the dancing rhythms of joy and civilised power. The Prague is one of the masterpieces of the symphonic repertoire and this was a highly accomplished performance of it, full of elegant humanity.

It was an odd experience to move from music of such sublimity to Quirk by Karl Jenkins. The contrast made it difficult not to find the second piece irredeemably trivial. Jenkins was born and raised in Penclawdd, on the north coast of the Gower Peninsula near Swansea and went to School in the area before studying music in Cardiff. This was the Welsh première of Quirk, an LSO commission. Quirk is in three sections, carrying the titles ‘Snap’, ‘Raga Religioso’ and ‘Chasing the Goose…’ respectively. Jenkins’ own programme note told us, simply enough, that Quirk “is so called because of its ‘quirky’ nature”. The whole is a characteristically eclectic confection. Each of the three pieces which make up Quirk is a miniature concertante work; the same three soloists are featured in each of the three pieces, a keyboard player, a percussionist and a flautist. Each is required to play a whole catalogue of instruments – the keyboard player is required to scurry between concert grand, harmonium and upright piano, for example; the flautist plays bass flute and piccolo flute as well as standard flute; the percussionist criss-crosses between something like the full range of the percussion family. The musical styles alluded to, quoted, adopted, are equally various too – to name but a few one hears echoes of Latin American music, Methodist hymn writing, Indian ragas, modern jazz piano, Hollywood film scores, pub piano, Rachmaninov – and much, much more. The first movement juxtaposed a Romantic melody and some minimalist figurations. The colours and rhythms were sometimes interesting, but the whole seemed to offer lots of effects without any very obvious causes, any sustaining development of musical thought. The slow – and mostly quiet – central movement (‘Raga Religioso’) had more instrumental colours to offer, from the percussionist playing the tabla to the pianist reaching inside the grand piano to pluck the strings, but also achieved a greater coherence, with some passages of delicate beauty. (It also required the keyboard player to play two instruments simultaneously at one point). ‘Chasing the goose…’ is described by the composer as “a manic excursion in rondo form”; with its Latin drums and whistles, its echoes of Tom and Jerry, the sense of chasing the narrowly uncatchable was quite effectively presented and there was humour both in the music and in the physical requirements placed on keyboard player and percussionist as they hurried to and fro from instrument to instrument. All three soloists – Neil Percy (Principal Percussionist with the LSO), Gareth Davies (Principal Flautist) and John Alley (Principal Keyboard) – all acquitted themselves well. At times a slightly more smiling demeanour might have been nice, though, in what was essentially a ‘fun’ piece. Not trivial, but essentially rather lightweight.

In the second half Andrew Haveron (well known for his spell as first violinist of the Brodsky Quartet) was the soloist in a rapt and beautifully inflected performance of The Lark Ascending. On a wet Welsh night the sunlit landscape of England was vividly evoked (though judging by the amount of coughing in the audience the lark might have been spreading some minor strain of avian flu). Haverson’s playing evoked both flight and song exquisitely, but with strength too. The LSO’s woodwinds and strings played with similar exactness and delicacy, and the conductor created and sustained a perfectly balanced and integrated sound.

Elgar’s Enigma Variations closed the programme. Of recent years, in particular, the LSO and Davis have made some highly regarded recordings of Elgar and, as with his Mozart, one expects assured and clearly conceived performances of music such as this, music with which he and the orchestra are thoroughly familiar. Very largely, this was a performance which plentifully lived up to such expectations. The opening variation, a portrait of the composer’s wife Caroline was richly rhapsodic and full of warmth. It set the tone for an unrushed and generally affectionate reading, though one might perhaps have wished for slightly sharper characterisation in one or two places, some greater sense of the gentle mockery surely implicit in, for example, Variation III’s portrait of Richard Baxter Townsend. But there was much that was admirable. The strings produced a beautiful tone throughout – the work of the violins being pa special joy in the seventh Variation; the solo cello passages in Variation XII’s portrait of Basil Nevinson were played in masterly fashion; the percussion section were, at all times, excellent, playing with gunfire-like sharpness and precision. Sir Colin and the orchestra revelled in the opportunities offered by Elgar’s score and there was an irresistible sense of confidence earned, of the successful completion and unifying of the work, in the closing bars of the final Variation. While this wasn’t perhaps the most individual or dramatic Enigma I have ever heard, it was a fine demonstration of the resources of an excellent orchestra under the baton of a substantial conductor. It made a good culmination to a concert celebrating the Festival’s sixtieth anniversary.

Glyn Pursglove


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