SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Webern: Passacaglia
Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand; La Valse
Zimmerman: Photoptosis
Richard Strauss: Burleske

Timing was everything in this slick performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra – from conductor Susanna Mälkki’s crisp direction, to soloist Artur Pizarro’s perfectly punctuated playing.

The bulk of the programme was formed from two of Ravel’s major works – the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, and La Valse. Much less troubling to compose than the Piano Concerto in G, the left hand concerto is not so flashy but all the more intense and affecting because of it. Not that the work is devoid of technical trickery. Ravel compensated for single-hand playing by filling the piano part with cross-keyboard writing. Yet for all Pizzaro’s dexterity, his playing sounded disappointingly dispassionate, even a little humdrum in parts. Much more exciting was the orchestra, which lifted the layers of Ravel’s score, especially in the central march section.

This orchestral brilliance found its fullest expression in La Valse. A hybrid work – neither ballet nor symphonic poem (Ravel himself described it as a ‘choreographic poem’) – La Valse often ends up played as a glitzy pastiche or a muddy swirl of sound. Neither problem arose here. The playing was crystal clear, and Mälkki skilfully guided her players through the shifting moods and textures.

Prior to this, soloist Pizzaro returned for Richard Strauss’s rarely heard Burleske. Originally intended as scherzo for piano and orchestra, the work (dating from 1885) is suffused with the influence of Schumann and Brahms. But it also bears the later hallmarks of Strauss’s operas and symphonic poems. It was an odd interlude in a programme of post-1918 works, but it worked well as a vehicle for Pizzaro’s skills.

Equally odd was Bernd Alois Zimmerman’s Photoptosis – a 20-minute rage of orchestral sound peppered with inexplicable musical quotations, from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, via Bach, Wagner and Scriabin. Zimmerman’s intention was to explore the idea of focused light on sound. But rather than ponder the composer’s complex inspiration, the listener was best advised to simply enjoy the intense vortex of sound produced by the orchestra.

In a sense, Zimmerman’s musical quoting, Strauss’s late Romantic blossoming and Ravel’s backward glance at old Vienna all connected to the opening work in the programme – Webern’s Passacaglia. The composer’s self-designated Opus 1, Passacaglia is both a statement of Schoenbergian modernism and a link with past musical traditions. It was the latter facet of the work that Mälkki honed in on – highlighting its unmistakeable Mahlerian and Straussian flourishes. But Schoenberg was there too, with traces of uneasy expressionism pointing to the thrills and fears of the future.

John-Pierre Joyce