SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Tchaikovsky: John Lill (piano), Walter Weller (conductor), BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, 20.2.2010. (GPu)

Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No.2

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.5

This was very much (to borrow a phrase from the sports pages) a concert of two halves. In the first half John Lill was the soloist in the less-often-played of Tchaikovsky’s two piano concertos. Despite the best efforts of Lill, and of Walter Weller and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, it has to be said that – as I have felt before now – such performances of the work as one hears make it relatively easy to understand why it isn’t so often performed as its predecessor. Diehard Tchaikovskians will doubtless be offended by my remarks, but my own feeling is that not only does it have fewer striking or memorable melodies than the first concerto (certainly there is nothing that begins seriously to compare with the dominant melody of the first concerto’s finale); that Tchaikovsky’s insistence on so much writing, especially in the first movement, in which the piano plays unaccompanied or the orchestra plays while the soloist remains silent, makes it hard not to feel a certain disjointedness in the work, a certain lack of meaningful dialogue and interplay; that in both outer movements there is a good deal which is, to put things bluntly, more bombast than poetry, writing full of effects which have no very evident or compelling causes, so that one is left with the feeling that much of the music is factitious rather than necessitated by larger arguments than itself; that each of the movements closes in a manner both predictable and almost banal. All that said, the work here of soloist and orchestra offered little reason for complaint. Lill avoided the temptations to vulgarity, to over-inflation, that parts of the work offer all too readily, his playing throughout being technically assured, and more decorous than flamboyant. Maybe a bit more sheer passion might, indeed, have been risked, but on the whole I preferred this kind of reading to the sort of excessiveness that this work sometimes gets from the soloist. The slow movement is, to my ears and mind, the one real high spot in the concerto. Its very individual use of the piano trio as a kind of sinfonia concertante group is attractive and intriguing and encourages some very individual writing, and offers a delightful contrast of scale and sound vis-à-vis the other two movements. Along with John Lill, Lesley Hadfield (violin) and John Senter (cello) played with winning lyricism, in a performance of beautifully judged phrasing and sweetness of tone. Here, as elsewhere in the concerto, Walter Weller’s conducting was sensitively supportive.

In the second half we heard a very fine performance of what I take to be an immeasurably superior work – Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. The relative tightness of construction, with the attractive use of sonata form in the first movement and the way in which the motto theme appears as comment and question in the andante and the contrasts of mood it creates (contrasts entirely integrated into a larger structural conception); the Valse of the third movement, beautifully put together and wholly engaging but, once again, problematised by the recurrence of the ‘Fate’ motto; the remarkable emotional and orchestral crosscurrents of the fourth movement, building up to a rather strenuous attempt at happiness and reconciliation – all these make of the Fourth one of the composer’s most tightly structured symphonies – according to the lights of the Germanic symphonic tradition – while it also contains’ (in more senses than one) much that is expressive of Tchaikovsky’s distinctively Russian sensibility. Walter Weller and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales gave a fine, consistently gripping performance of the work. The opening statement of the motto was made with dignity, but also with a certain fineness and subtlety which avoided any danger of the excessively rhetorical, and the rest of the first movement had (not least in the work of the brass section) an admirable clarity and precision and a consistent sense of purpose. The playing of the low strings and the solo horn were exemplary in the andante, very much ‘cantabile’, and evocative of both emotional intimacy, of personal involvement in the emotions explored, and also of a sense of space that prevented any suspicions of the merely egotistical or solipsistic. This movement was taken fairly slowly, conducted with a sense of scale which was grand but also convincingly human. The Valse which followed was beautifully paced and played with a warmth that was never excessive; the rich variety of Tchaikovsky’s orchestral colours and effects was vividly articulated without any sense of pedantry or lingering self-indulgence. The final movement was played and conducted with remarkable passion and intensity. A firmly deliberate opening, in which Weller’s balancing of orchestral sections was a model of lucidity, led to a compelling acceleration, in which orchestral precision and discipline were both striking in themselves and clearly subordinated to a vision of the movement as a whole. The near hysterical quality of parts of the closing pages was not ignored and this was not as ‘light’ a piece as in some readings; the music’s efforts at integration were never allowed to achieve an easy success. Contrary impulses co-existed, contrary emotions found a ‘harmony’ which was precarious rather than final or absolute. The result made for demanding and convincingly persuasive listening. One felt that Weller’s Viennese lucidity had discovered and given expression to at least one route towards the heart of this decidedly Russian music.

Glyn Pursglove