SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Tchaikovsky: Tasmin Little (violin) / Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra / Owain Arwel Hughes (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 17.7.2008 (GPu)

Fantasy-Overture: Romeo and Juliet
Violin Concerto in D, Op. 35
Symphony No.6 in B minor, Op. 74 (Pathétique)


Though preceded by a Primary Prom (The Mozart Effect, a musical-dramatic piece by David Baxter, with arrangements by Helen Woods), a Children’s Prom (with music by Holst, Badalt, Tchaikovsky, Fauré, Saint-Saëns and Abreu) and a Gamelan Prom (‘Sounds and Stories from Java’), this was the first orthodox classical concert in the series of Welsh Proms, presenting a series of daily concerts until July 26^th and including appearances by, inter alia, Angela Hewitt, Bryn Terfel, Rebecca Evans, Thomas Trotter, Maya Koch and Freddy Kempf.

There are good and obvious commercial reasons why the Welsh Proms can’t be as adventurous as their big London brother. The familiar rather than the new tends to dominate the programming. Still, the format overture-concerto-symphony is about as traditional a piece of concert programming as there might very well be. Make all three pieces Tchaikovsky, and make them these three pieces and you really do have what might seem dangerously over familiar. I overheard one of the regular attendants at St. David’s saying to one customer – “I don’t expect you’ll need a programme tonight – you’ll know all this music”. But things don’t, after all, always come to be familiar and ‘traditional’ through simple laziness, conservatism or cultural inertia. Sometimes they endure, and get repeated, because they work well.

The Romeo and Juliet Overture – written when Tchaikovsky was 29, but revised a good deal later on – is, of course, a thoroughly accomplished piece. But, I confess, it has always struck me as too sentimental a response to the play to do it anything like full justice. It is more rhetoric than poetry and Owain Arwel Hughes’ conducting tended to ‘point’ phrases so forcefully that the rhetorical held sway in this performance. But the famous love theme sang out yearningly and many of the details of Tchaikovsky’s orchestration were winningly clear. The conclusion, with the recapitulation of both the opening quasi-liturgical music and the love theme, worked very well and there was a suitably theatrical (even if this was always a concert piece) climax in the closing chords.

There is much more of real tragedy in Tchaikovsky’s last symphony. From most accounts Tchaikovsky, at the time of writing the symphony, seemed to be in reasonably good spirits. Yet listening to it now, and knowing as we do that the composer would be dead nine days after the premiere of the work, it is hard not to hear in it anticipations of death and adumbrations of a profoundly troubled soul. Compared to the overture, this is music far freer of masks, music of personal truth rather than skilled rhetoric. From the first movement’s opening darkness, through the oddly ‘limping’ waltz rhythm of the second movement and the somewhat manic march of the third movement to the profound despair of the adagio lamentoso which closes the work, the sense of crisis is never far away. This performance by Owain Arwel Hughes and the B.S.O., sound as it was, didn’t quite have the intensity that one has sometimes heard in this symphony. The lamenting melody in the first movement worked particularly well, but the balance between hope and despair that can give the waltz of the second movement so magical a power didn’t quite come off. And perhaps – by the highest standards – the almost hysterical grotesquerie of the third movement wasn’t quite as troubling as it can be, the conclusion seeming rather more straightforwardly triumphant than should, surely, be the case? But there was much to admire too – both brass and woodwind distinguished themselves at various points in the performance. The final movement was aptly bleak and disconsolate, constantly gripping in its simultaneous assertion of profound personal turmoil and a surface dignity of lamentation. It was here that the performance was at its most searingly emotional. The stopped horns added very effectively their disturbing commentary and the music’s sense of profound anguish fittingly sank into an uncomfortable silence.

In between overture and symphony we had our concerto. And it undoubtedly proved the highlight of the concert. Tasmin Little’s love of the work was obvious – both visually and audibly – and she showed herself a thoroughly persuasive advocate of it. She compelled attention throughout, with her unforced lyricism and her avoidance of exaggeration. She conveyed the relaxed nature of much of this music and the effect was – for all the piece’s familiarity – of considerable freshness and radiance. The concerto clearly isn’t at any risk of becoming – or of sounding – over familiar when played by this soloist, at any rate. In the first movement cadenza Little’s impressive technical command was obvious bit in no way flaunted – everything was in the service of the music; that was true, not least, of her use of silence, some of her pauses being every bit as eloquent as her brilliance. In the slow movement there was, from both soloist and orchestra, a delightful sense of song (this is a canzonneta after all) with just enough hints of melancholy to mildly complicate the emotional texture. The final movement stimulated some fiery dancing rhythms and phrasing, an all-pervading sense of Joy (so absolute that the word deserves an initial capital) expressed to perfection. Here is Tchaikovsky at something like his most extrovert – pseudo bagpipe music and all – and this was a performance that thoroughly involved its audience, invited to share the obvious pleasure of the performers.

It may well be that the ‘gimmick’ of the ‘Proms’ title for a series of concerts, and the considerable local advertising campaign (ticket barriers at a number of South Wales railway stations have been carrying details for some time, for example) brings in some listeners who don’t regularly attend the orchestral concerts at St. David’s during the rest of the year. For any such, this programme (for all my earlier remarks about the over familiar) and these performances must surely have extended a persuasive invitation to return. The unintimidating accessibility of these pieces – for all that the Pathétique is a work of profound subjectivity – and the unpretentious, non-exclusive manner of both soloist and conductor shouldn’t have scared away any newcomers. Nor did they disappoint many old-timers, I suspect.

Glyn Pursglove


Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page