SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Martinu, Szymanowski, Dvořák: Alina Ibragimova (violin), BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Walter Weller (conductor), Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff 3.6.2009 (GPu)

Martinu, Concerto for Double String Orchestra, Piano and Timpani
Szymanowski, Violin Concerto No.1
Dvořák, Noonday Witch


To quote a line from one of Christopher Marlowe’s translations from Ovid: “Jove send me more such afternoons as this” – sentiments prompted by this rewarding afternoon concert in Cardiff’s (still) new concert hall and rehearsal space.

Martinu’s extraordinary (and still rather underrated) Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano and Timpani was written in – and responds to – some extraordinary circumstances. But, like any valuable work of art, its significance is by no means bounded by those immediate circumstances. In June of 1938 Martinu returned to Czechoslovakia from Paris. The threat posed by German aggression was evident and everywhere strongly felt; it was against such a background that Martinu set off on his travels again. He had received a commission (not for the first time) from Paul Sacher, and he went to Switzerland to work on it. While there he learned of the September 1938 Munich Pact, which facilitated the German appropriation of the Sudetenland and by October the German army had entered Czechoslovakia. As Martinu wrote later: “with anguish we listened every day to the news bulletins, trying to find and encouragement and hope that did not come. The clouds were quickly gathering and becoming steadily more threatening. During this time I was at work on the Double Concerto, but all my thoughts and longings were constantly with my endangered country”. The piece Martinu wrote under such circumstances is full of fierce energy, of anger, frustration and tension; but it is also full of determination and any slight temptation towards despair is rapidly dismissed and overwhelmed. It was surprising that the two string orchestras were not physically separated, which would have clarified some of the rhythmic and harmonic exchanges; the antiphonal dimension of the work was less obvious than it might have been. But in most other respects this was a memorable performance; pianist Catherine Roe-Williams brought a percussive clarity to her playing and timpanist Steve Barnard was exemplary in his precision, crispness and resonance. Walter Weller sustained the tension of the opening movement relentlessly, the motoric rhythm insistently aggressive and troubled. In the central largo the plangent opening chords were devastating in their effect. The work of the double basses was particularly impressive in this movement and the relatively introspective writing for piano expressed the pervading unease with troubled gravity before the movement subsided into a troubled silence. The cross rhythms of the final movement were meticulously – but unfussily – articulated in ensemble work of a high order, and the demanding pages of this allegro were played with driving intensity, with a kind of whirling precision, insistent, dignified, defiant and proudly troubled. Weller and the orchestra gave us a profoundly stirring experience, a persuasive account of a work whose meditation on war and peace, nationalism and determination has resonances far beyond its immediate occasion and achieves a musical language which anticipates much later music while itself audibly growing out of Martinu’s musical inheritance.

Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto transports the listener to an emotional and musical world that could hardly be more different. Europe’s troubles of 1916 left no explicit mark on this concerto, a concerto which seems to speak, in a nocturnal dream-like musical language, of Szymanowski’s inner life of memory and fantasy, mental faculties fed by his fascination with an east both real and imaginary, fed in turn by his reading and by travels which included visits to Italy, Sicily, Tunis and Biskra in the years before the composition of this concerto. It seems to explore a musical world which has something in common with that in which Szymanowski’s fantastic novel Ephebos is set, a world full of “green groves, emerald hilly slopes, inaccessible crevices and gorges fragrant with absinth and thyme”, of “swollen” Byzantine domes “on which the sun has lit a blinding purple flame”. More immediately it took inspiration from ‘May Night’, a poem by Tadeusz Miciński (1837-1918), a poem of quasi-hallucinatory nocturnal vision, in which:

Crowned asses gather majestically on the grass
As fireflies kiss the wild rose
And Death shimmers on the pond
Singing a wanton song.
Ephemerids
Dance in flight
…Pan plays his pipes in the oak groves.

The orchestral writing of the concerto owes much to the recent example of French impressionism (though the example of Scriabin has by no means been forgotten either); the writing for the soloist is remarkable and perhaps more fully individual. It is writing of impassioned lyricism, about which it is hard not to find oneself using metaphors of flight and bird-song, like a skylark or nightingale high in the sky above an impressionist forest, as it were. Alina Ibragimova’s facility in the highest registers of her instrument was impressive and the sustained ecstasy of the work passionately communicated, occupying as it does the border territory where pleasure turns to pain and vice-versa. Though close analysis reveals a complex structure, the listener’s experience of the work is rather of organic form, to use Coleridge’s distinction: “the form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; … the organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form”. Walter Weller’s conducting respected the work’s “form” while seemingly allowing its innate fluidity to find its own destinations. Just occasionally, in the work of both soloist and orchestra, the rhapsodic intensity seemed to sag, but for the most part this was an exciting and satisfying reading of a highly individual work.

We moved from night to noon with ‘the Noonday Witch’, one of the symphonic poems which Dvořák wrote in the 1890s, in response to the literary ballads of the Czech poet Karl Jaromír Erben (1811-1870). The music sounded peculiarly robust and forthright after the subtlety and evanescence of the Szymanowski concerto. The story the piece narrates is pretty straightforward, the tale of how a mother frightens her troublesome child with the threat of the Noonday Witch; the witch materialises and demands possession of the child; the father returns home and discovers the child dead and his wife collapsed on the floor. Nor is the music particularly complex; there is some initial (rather ponderous!) humour in the depiction of the busy mother and the fractious child; the witch’s approach is gradual and is represented in what is perhaps the most interesting passage in the work, with muted violins and violas above a sustained low note on bass clarinet. There is some suitably sinister writing in the sombre chords of the close. Weller – conducting without a score – put a persuasive case for the piece, but it was hard not to feel that this was by some way the least substantial of the three works heard. It wasn’t the most stirring of climaxes to a fine concert.

Glyn Pursglove 


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