SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT REVIEW

Walton and Holst:  Alban Gerhardt (cello), Ladies of the BBC National Chorus of Wales, BBC National Orchestra of Wales / David Atherton (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 15.01.10 (GPu)
 

Walton, Cello Concerto

Holst, The Planets


“[David] Atherton is a conductor of genius” – so wrote Sir Michael Tippett. One might, I suppose, say that as a composer whose work was very well served by Atherton on more than one occasion, Tippett was not entirely unbiased. More widely, however, Atherton seems to me to have been rather underrated in many quarters. His work with the London Sinfonietta (of which he was co-founder) has, of course, received something like its full due of praise. But such praise has perhaps led some to pigeonhole him as a specialist in ‘difficult’ contemporary music – overlooking his considerable achievements as a conductor of opera and ‘mainstream’ orchestral works. He is a conductor whose work is characterised by an ability to elicit textures of great clarity and crispness from an orchestra, by his ability unfussily to draw sections of the orchestra into prominence as required and to ‘fade’ them into background as required. While he may not be the most obviously intense or charismatic of conductors, he is gifted in the products of his attention to orchestral detail – an Atherton performance always seems to enable one to ‘hear’ things one had not properly noticed before; yet such an attention rarely operates at the expense of a matching awareness of issues of larger design and structure. He is a master of what one might call clarity in intricacy. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales seems always to have responded well to his baton – as evidenced by more than one concert at the Proms over the years, and this programme of English music was no exception.

In the performance of Walton’s Cello Concerto that opened this (relatively brief) programme, Alban Gerhardt was a compelling soloist and under Atherton’s direction the BBC National Orchestra of Wales were supportive partners. Leaving aside one trivial moment of uncertainty (or failure of memory) in the fast central movement, Gerhardt’s was a performance of great technical assurance and consistently beautiful tone. The two outer movements were taken somewhat more quickly than is often the case, but I am not sure that the work didn’t gain in overall coherence and balance as a result. Gerhard has an excellent feeling for phrase and line and played throughout with persuasive and inviting conviction (though there were also one or two brief moments when, for all the lyrical passion of his playing as a whole, climaxes felt slightly underplayed). But for the most part, not least in the central movement, his playing was vivacious, sometimes fiercely accented and – as in the third movement – expressively lyrical and eloquently meditative. Everywhere David Atherton’s control of dynamics and texture was exemplary and a work that can sometimes sound primarily ‘clever’ had a real weight and depth in the playing of both soloist and orchestra.

We have all heard performances of The Planets which present Holst’s work as primarily an orchestral showpiece or, at best, a demonstration of the composer’s technical mastery of a large orchestra. This wasn’t one of those performances. David Atherton took a view of the work which recognised its possession of a greater seriousness of intention than either of those previous propositions allows for. Though the orchestral playing did full justice to Holst’s sonorities, Atherton’s reading of the work seemed to encourage awareness of the work’s ‘argument’, as it moved from youthfully aggressive energy to the ethereal serenity and the approach of some kind of death to this world at Neptune’s close. As one might expect, Atherton brought out with particular effectiveness the work’s occasional affinities with, say, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Mars had real ferocity, with the brass on good declamatory form, the sickeningly jagged rhythms were powerfully realised and there was rather more sense of horror than glory. The horn and woodwind opening of Venus was beautifully realised, in part due to Atherton’s refined ear for orchestral texture; the first string melody always strikes me as somewhat saccharine, though a degree of understatement here did something to mitigate this, and the almost pointilliste end to the movement was particularly exquisite. Mercury was full of bubbling energy, like (topically enough in the prevailing weather) a freshet of melt-water, with a hint of some decidedly ‘French’ textures later in the movement. Jupiter, by way of contrast, danced rather than flowed, and its famous theme sung out with convinced good humour. Saturn was performed with a beautifully judged sense of pace and space, and with Atherton’s direction drawing out the dark, haunted beauty of some remarkable writing. The scherzo of Uranus captured Holst’s musical prestidigitation, responding articulately to the music’s tricky playfulness, its insistent rhythms, percussive explosions, rhapsodic strings and sudden hushes – a real (musical) bag of tricks. Atherton’s reading of Neptune, surely informed by his familiarity with so much later music, brought out the sophisticated and subtle orchestral writing in this music, almost without conventional rhythm and melody; the off-stage contribution of the Ladies of the BBC National Chorus of Wales was perfectly integrated. ‘Integration’, indeed, was perhaps the greatest virtue of this performance, a performance which eschewed colour for colour’s sake and was not content to ‘display’ each of Holst’s planets as a separate musical object.

 

Glyn Pursglove