SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT

 

The Nash Ensemble’s series L’Invitation au Voyage – Exploring the music of France and Spain: Juan Martín (flamenco guitar), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (mezzo soprano), Nash Ensemble, Paul Watkins (conductor). Wigmore Hall, London 6.3.2010 (JPr)

Sadly,  this concert was overshadowed by the news filtering through from a few members of the audience,  of the death of the fine British tenor, Philip Langridge CBE. His repertoire of Lieder, oratorio and Britten operas meant I never saw quite as many of his performances as some others but I enjoyed talking to him last year (see the link in Seen and Heard's commemorative tribute) when he was a most generous interviewee, very friendly and informative. In the subsequent performances of Lulu at Covent Garden when he sang the three small roles of the Prince, Manservant and Marquis, he gave us remarkable vignettes that encapsulated just what a remarkable singing actor he truly was. He will be sadly missed.

This series of concerts began last October apparently with a scene-setting rendition by Felicity Lott of Duparc’s L’Invitation au Voyage setting of Baudelaire’s poem which offers a journey to a land where ‘all is harmony and beauty, luxury, calm and delight’. For the Nash Ensemble the ‘voyage’ was the short one between France and Spain to show how the musical heritages of these two countries are interlinked. In this concert, augmented by a set of three pieces from Juan Martín’s Andalucían Suites, there was music by Maurice Ravel, French composer of impressionist music who had a Basque background, with works by the Spaniard, Manuel de Falla, who spent several years in Paris.

 

Between 1914 and 1917 Ravel composed Le Tombeau de Couperin as a suite for piano, later adapting some of its movements for chamber orchestra. Essentially, it is a tribute to the whole of eighteenth-century French music, as well as to François Couperin, in which Ravel dedicated each movement to a friend who had been killed in the First World War. The Nash Ensemble based the three sections they performed on  movements common to the piano and orchestral versions which are included in an arrangement for wind quartet by Mason Jones, long-time principal horn player of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who died last year. Le Tombeau de Couperin was given a fresh, technically proficient, performance by the quintet which was certainly witty, full of grace and elegance. For  me however, it contained a French sang-froid that I suspect was at odds with the colours and character present in the original piano work.

 

A major part of this concert was devoted to Manuel de Falla’s music. His compositions are strongly influenced by the folk music of Spain in which the guitar plays a prominent part. Despite his inspiration being early Spanish music and flamenco, Falla actually composed only one piece for that instrument. Between 1907 and 1914 , he  lived in Paris and came under the influence of  impressionist music including Ravel's. Armed with this new idiom - and before he left Paris - he composed his Seven Spanish Folksongs for voice and piano. Later, when back in his homeland, he produced the first version of El amor brujo (Love, the Magician) a ‘gitanería’ or gypsy ballet in one act, written and premièred in Madrid in 1915. It is a love story about the gypsy girl Candélas, who can only be freed from the evil spirit of her murdered husband through the kiss of a perfect and true love. The dead husband's ghost returns to haunt Candélas and new lover, Carmelo. To rid them of the ghost, all the gypsies make a large circle around their campfire at midnight and within this circle Candélas performs the famous ‘Ritual Fire Dance’. This causes the ghost to appear, with whom Candélas dances and as they whirl faster and faster, the magic of the dance draws the ghost into the fire, making it vanish forever. Strangely, the Wigmore Hall programme contained the translations for the Seven Songs but nothing apart from the synopsis and background notes to El amor brujo: it was difficult to know quite what was going on … unless extraordinarily familiar with the work.

 

The mezzo soloist was the redoubtable Catherine Wyn-Rogers who was accompanied with suitable rhythmic vitality by Ian Brown at the piano She gave a fine, stylish, account of the Seven Spanish Songs – with the poignancy of Asturiana and ardour of Jota coming across particularly well. However, overall, they lacked a little of the plangent intensity that would have taken us from the English shires to the heat and passion of Spain. This quality was in greater evidence in her songs and recitations from El amor brujo which had considerable passion and gusto and were sung with good Spanish diction - as far as I could tell.  Squeezed onto the limited Wigmore Hall platform, the Nash Ensemble was efficiently conducted by Paul Watkins but the sound was restricted so that de Falla’s harmonic colours and compelling orchestral textures did not have the same impact they might have had in a larger hall. The familiar music of the ‘Ritual Fire Dance’ did however cast an evocative spell. This problem of too many performers producing too large a sound in a confined setting also afflicted the performance of de Falla’s 1917 The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife (the original version of The Three-Cornered Hat) which was otherwise melodic and characterful. Throughout the evening there were notable virtuoso violin contributions from the leader of the Nash Ensemble, Marianne Thorson, and from Richard Watkins’ horn.

 

The only truly Spanish colour and atmosphere created the whole evening was by the hypnotic flamenco guitar of Juan Martín. Allied to the percussive pounding of his left foot on the platform and right hand on the body of his guitar,  his playing gave us images of the Flamenco dancers haunting the entire evening but never seen. Torrente del Alma (Torrent of the Soul) was a Rondeña inspired by the Spanish town of Ronda and the rugged Sierras -  ‘so different from the Costa del Sol’ as Señor Martín aptly commented. In this and the other two self-composed pieces in his set, a Buerías, Santiago, and a Rumba, Le Feria, Señor Martín, surely one of the best guitarists in the world,  held the audience hypnotically in his thrall through his impassioned artistry, skilful fretwork and the speed of his fingers. He truly made his instrument speak – and unlike most of the evening - with an authentic Spanish accent rather than an English one!

Jim Pritchard