SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Elgar, Wagner, Rachmaninov: BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Susan Bickley (mezzo), Sian Edwards (conductor), Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, 24.4.2010 (GPu)

Elgar, The Wand of Youth – Suite No. 2

Wagner, Wesendonck Lieder

Rachmaninov, Symphony No.3


Some interesting programming here, creating a sequence which began with an Elgarian retrospect on childhood, and then traversed the complex interrelationships of love and bliss, desire and death in Wagner’s great song sequence, before arriving at Rachmaninov’s third symphony, written when he was in his sixties, an exile whose retrospect stirs bitterness as well as nostalgia in the music of an ageing artist less than wholly comfortable in the world (speaking musically as well as geographically) in which he now found himself.

The programme was originally advertised as to be conducted by Tadaaki Otaka and with Emma Bell as soloist in the Wesendonck Lieder, but circumstances compelled the replacement of both – Bickley stepping in some weeks before the concert and Sian Edwards taking over at short notice when Otaka became one of the many victims of the flight disruptions caused by the Icelandic interruption. The changes did not seriously disrupt things – while this was not a concert likely to feature in my choice of the very finest things I heard in 2010, it offered generally assured performances and one was glad to be able to hear it. Sian Edwards, in particular, deserves thanks and congratulations for coming to the rescue at short notice and directing such satisfactory performances.

The music of The Wand of Youth was originally written by a very young Elgar (when he was about twelve or thirteen according to his later account) as accompaniment to a play performed by the young composer and his brothers and sisters. More than thirty five years later the mature Elgar (now at or approaching his fiftieth birthday) orchestrated the pieces, doing so, of course, with a wealth of experience and knowledge quite different from anything he could have brought to the pieces at the time of their first composition. It is the strange and striking blend of innocence, of childhood sensitivity, with adult sophistication and high technical competence, that gives this suite (like No.1) its distinctive charm. The opening ‘March’ essentially belongs in the world of toy soldiers, though its climax contains hints of the real thing; ‘Little Bells’ is as concerned with the diminutive as its title suggests, but its ‘bells’ invite and announce a kind of crossover territory between childhood and adulthood; ‘Moths and Butterflies’ received an attractive, evocative performances in which Edwards drew out very well the subtleties of Elgar’s orchestral writing; ‘Fountain Dance’ was nicely fluid, but perhaps didn’t ‘dance’ as much as one might have wished; ‘The Tame Bear’ and ‘The Wild Bears’ were both of them very well characterised, the first with an engaging and rather poignant sense of shackled movement, the second with vivacious momentum, in an abundance of assertive (but unthreatening) energy. A very enjoyable opening, well played and well conducted.

How very different, emotionally and morally, the thoroughly ‘adult’ world of Wagner’s great song cycle! Whatever the actual relationship between Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck (a question that matters more to biographers than to listeners), the poems she wrote and the settings he wrote unmistakably belong to a world not far removed from the erotic landscape of Tristan and Isolde – so much so that Wagner marked two of them (‘Im Treibhaus’ and ‘Träume’) ‘studies for “Tristan und Isolde”’. These, as it happens, were the songs which fared best of all in this particular performance. ‘Im Treibhaus’ was full of confiding intimacy, and Susan Bickley responded with intense precision to the suggestions of the text; Edwards and the Orchestra complemented her voice with some exquisite playing, picking up on Wagner’s musical ‘representations’ (though the word is too crude) of branches “tracing signs in the air” and achieving a particularly beautiful and effective unity of voice and instruments in the fifth stanza, in which the female protagonist (Wagner originally entitled the work simply ‘Five Poems for a Female Voice’ recognises her affinity with the vegetable residents of the hothouse, “we share the same fate : / though bathed in light and splendour, / our home is not here”. The last stanza’s evaporation into darkness and silence was especially lovely. Bickley brought an attractive dignity to ‘Träume’, a sense of inner stability in her characterisation, a facing-up to the approach of death which carried great conviction. In one or two other places in the sequence there was less magic, a slight sense of, if not the merely ‘safe’, then of a carefulness and restraint slightly at odds with the excitement of sentiments and music. Just once or twice, singer and orchestra were not perfectly together (perhaps the last-minute disruptions were to blame), but overall this was a genuinely rewarding performance of a very demanding work.

Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony has never quite persuaded me of its virtues – or, I should say, the virtues that others clearly find there. The loss, doubtless, is mine. Nothing that Sian Edwards and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales did effected a conversion or a change of mind on my part; but, so far as I could judge (given the confession I have already made), this was a performance which largely did justice to the work. If I felt that parts of the work were far more convincing than the whole, then that was, I have to admit, no more than I have always found in listening to this symphony. In the first movement the strings were impressive in their familiar flowing melody, and Edwards phrased and paced that melody very attractively. The bipartite second movement (Adagio ma non troppo followed by Allegro vivace) began with its hushed introduction beautifully played by the horn of Tom Thorpe and the harp of Valerie Aldrich-Smith, before Lesley Hadfield’s eloquent statement of the movement’s first important melody; this adagio contains some of Rachmaninov’s loveliest orchestral writing and this was a performance that brought out many of its qualities; the ensuing allegro, dense with unusual textures and full of nervous, troubled energy, was also played with real assurance and purpose. The allegro finale (the movement I have always found least satisfying) began with a well-achieved assertiveness but the conflicting moods and manners in the remainder of the movement (the nostalgic and the bitter, the self-assertive and the self-doubting, the near-vulgar and the genuinely beautiful) never quite achieved an underlying unity, of a real cohesiveness beneath their superficial disparities, so that the triumphant, ‘victorious’ final pages of the work sounded a little hollow, for all the splendour of sound, too much like easy rhetoric and too little like hard-earned poetry.

So, for me, a concert in which the final work was a slight anti-climax. But, as I have suggested, that may say more about me than about the performers.

Glyn Pursglove