SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Tippett, Schumann and Martinů (Second Opinion) : Elisabeth Leonskaya (piano), BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jiří Bělohlávek (conductor) Barbican Hall, 8.5.2010 (GE)

Tippett: Fantasia concertante on a Theme of Corelli

Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54

Martinů: Fantaisies symphoniques (Symphony No. 6)


As the final concert of the BBCSO’s survey of Martinů’s symphonies, this was a thoughtful programme around the concept of Fantasy. Tippett’s Fantasia concertante on a Theme of Corelli, premièred by the BBCSO, is compellingly linked to Martinů not only by its shared year of completion (1953), but also by the composers’ mutual regard for, and indeed in Martinů’s case obsession with, concerto grosso form. Using an ensemble of three soloists and double string orchestra, and true to the spirit of the Fantasia, Tippett spins his extemporizations through increasingly florid variations. Stratospheric, fantastical interpolations and striking antiphonal effects create propulsive energy as Tippett’s harmonic world meets and then melds with Corelli’s in the richness of the Andante espressivo, as sublime as anything in this genre from Elgar, Vaughan Williams or Britten. Elegant, yet intense, the BBCSO’s strings under Jiří Bělohlávek gave a performance of lustre and profundity.

Schumann’s Piano Concerto started life as a single movement Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra. Failure to enjoy Elisabeth Leonskaya’s otherwise technically accomplished rendition of the three movement version is explained by a closer look at Breitkopf und Härtel’s score. Edited by Clara Schumann, it clearly indicates the first movement tempo as Allegro affettuoso, with a quick metronome marking of minim = 84 beats per minute and two minim beats per bar. Playing it nearer minim = 44, with too much affettuoso and not enough Allegro, meant that even the first movement’s exquisitely affecting Andante espressivo had the life sucked out of it. The Intermezzo suffered similarly, although it did not lack poetry, but even the finale rarely felt liberated from rhythmic tensions. At around 34 minutes, this performance was five minutes longer than in needed to be. Nonetheless, audience approval secured Chopin’s E flat Nocturne as an encore.

Completed in 1953, Martinů’s Fantaisies symphoniques was originally entitled New Fantastic Symphony, as a homage to Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. In his outstanding new book on Martinů’s symphonies, Michael Crump tells us that ‘Berlioz was the composer best represented in Martinů’s library of scores’, and in his comprehensive pre-concert talk, David Nice mentioned Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s view that the final Allegro Vivace and Lento of Martinů’s last movement reference the end of Berlioz’s first movement. It is not surprising, therefore, that Fantaisies symphoniques, apart from a nod to ABA form in the first movement, is as free-flowing and liberated in its shape and structure as its revolutionary predecessor.

The fantastical volatility of the score, with its continual changes of tempo, darting moods, instrumental solos, interpolated sections for wind or string groups, propulsive, motoric climaxes rising from passages of murky haze, as at the start of the first and second movements, requires extraordinary skill to bring off. Bělohlávek, surely today’s finest Martinů interpreter, and the BBCSO gave an unassailably great performance of this masterpiece, if anything tauter and more cogently unified than his fine Chandos recording.

Without denying Martinů’s almost ecstatic freedom of invention, Bělohlávek’s attention to, and full expression of, both the detail and the larger scale was exemplary. He never lost sight of the cellos’ opening F-G flat-E-F ‘idée fixe’ (linked to Dvořák’s Requiem), a freighted motif that recurs in various forms and inversions up to a searing declamation on trumpets before the work’s end. He was vividly alive to Martinů’s counterbalancing harmonic ‘idée fixe’, his beloved ‘Moravian cadence’ in its many forms. In a haunting echo of Berlioz’s doomed attachment to the actress Harrieth Smithson, this cadence, so important in his fantastical dream opera ‘Julietta’, is inextricably linked to Martinů’s attachment to the young Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová, who studied with him in Paris and who died tragically young. Bělohlávek unleashed this heart-rending longing in the violins’ passionately exuberant outburst as they soar above the stave in the second movement and pivotally in a joyous Allegro dance that precedes the frenzied Vivace concluding the work.  In the face of a deluge of Mahler, Martinů shows us that less is so much more.

Those who have followed the six concerts in this Martinů odyssey will leave it with heavy hearts, for it has been one of the most enlightening and moving symphonic traversals in decades, leaving no doubts about Martinů’s greatness. Let us hope that the BBCSO at least will give us not only the other large scale works, such as the Frescoes and Parables and the massive Gilgamesh, but also some of the splendid concertos, such as the exquisite Oboe Concerto, the second Violin Concerto, the Concerto for Two Violins, the Concerto for Violin, Piano and Orchestra and the Rhapsody-Concerto for Viola.

Graham Eskell

Note: Reader Graham Eskell was invited to submit this review after he sent in some interesting comments on our earlier review by GD. He describes himself as a passionate, lifelong music-lover and occasional writer on music and musicians and adds that decades of concert and opera-going and record-collecting continue vigorously, undiminished by a long career devoted to teaching.  His guiding rules for appreciating music are that: 1. There are still great performances to be heard, and we have the right to expect them.  2. We can never know as much as we should about the music that we think we know already. Wise words for any reviewer.  Ed