SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Elgar, Mendelssohn: James Ehnes (violin), Philharmonia Orchestra / Vladimir Ashkenazy (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 29.1.2010 (GPu)

Elgar, Overture, Cockaigne
Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64
Elgar, Symphony No. 1 in A flat major, Op.55


Which is Elgar? The Elgar of the magically sensitive Serenade of 1892 or the very demonstrative and rhetorical Elgar of the Imperial March of 1897 (to take examples from the relatively early phase of the composer’s output)? The answer, of course, is both. In Elgar’s lesser works one or the other of the polarities which his output embodies is predominant, or finds exclusive expression in the piece; in his most significant works such dichotomies co-exist. We know where we are, certainly, with the Cockaigne overture, written in 1900. The piece was, he rightly told Jaeger, “cheerful and Londony – stout and steaky”; to Richter he observed that it contained “nothing deep or melancholy – it is intended to be honest, healthy, humorous and strong but not vulgar”. (It is, incidentally, the first of the composer’s orchestral scores to contain that quintessentially Elgarian direction ‘nobilmente’). It is Elgar at his most pictorially evocative, furthest away from the ‘purer’ music of the symphonies. On this particular occasion it got a slightly uneven performance; the opening had moments of raggedness, seeming to lack a final polish as it were; things improved a good deal, however, even if this never quite became a performance in which one discerned much of Elgar’s humour. In the 1920s Osbert Sitwell complained that Elgar’s music was excessively “full of English humour” – he probably wouldn’t have wanted to make that specific complaint on the strength of this particular performance. Most thoroughly satisfying was the complex contrapuntal passage near the close and the final statement of the ‘London’ theme – which had all the grandeur one could require of music marked ‘nobilmente’.

Cockaigne opened the evening’s programme; Elgar’s First Symphony closed it. Here the dichotomies of Elgar’s musical sensibility, and the relationship(s) between them provide the very stuff of the work’s ‘meaning’. Like a lot of Elgar’s music, this first symphony seems to embody a particularly Edwardian version of a debate that goes back at least to the Greeks: the debate as to the relative claims and stature of the active and contemplative lives, of public and pastoral worlds, of the heroic and the pastoral. The music isn’t – unlike the lesser works – the outcome of a choice between these antonyms, but rather searches for a form and means that might allow their reconciliation, might establish a stable and productive sense of their necessary interdependence. These were dimensions of the symphony which Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Philharmonia brought out very well; there was less overt nostalgia than in some more purely ‘English’ performances of the work and there were moments when the work’s pastoral evocations seemed more redolent of the Slavic lands than of the borderlands of England and Wales. But this served only to save the work from the dangers of mere parochialism. There was a monumentality that went far beyond matters of patriotism – touching rather on the tension between action and contemplation – in Ashkenazy’s conducting of the slow introduction to the first movement, and the flurry of ideas and fragments which follow spoke forcefully of the effort to bring conflicting impulses into a degree of balance. The close of the movement was marked by some excellent work from violins, violas and harp and, at the very end, from trumpets and horns. Contrarieties existed in a somewhat uneasy state of temporary reconciliation. The ensuing scherzo was initially full of activity that gave way beautifully to a sense of space and stillness which seemed, in this performance, to speak of a state of mind rather than, primarily, of “something you hear down by the river”, as Elgar famously put it. But, of course, no neat distinction between inner and outer words can be definitively made in such a romantic context. The adagio was, as it should be, a thing of great beauty, with some sinuous rhythms, music of real innerness, of, again, a country of the mind as much as of Herefordshire. The sense of struggle, of the ultimate undesirability of choice between the possible alternatives, fuelled a thoroughly restless reading of the last movement, peopled by challenging reminiscences of material from the earlier movements and here performed with some beautiful gradations of dynamics. Throughout this last movement, Ashkenazy created a powerful sense of forward momentum, while acknowledging all the echoes of what had gone before; as it consistently does, this was music that looked in opposite directions at the same time. When the famous tune that functions as the symphony’s motto returned there was a real enough sense of triumph, but one also felt that the theme’s implications were, as one might say, contested, that its ‘nobility’ had to belong as much to mind as to action. This was a fine, convincing, distinctive performance.

Yet, for all the quality of Ashkenazy’s reading of Elgar’s symphony, the absolute highlight of the evening was James Ehnes’s performance of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. One of the great works of Mendelssohn’s maturity, this concerto must have seemed startlingly innovative at the time of its first performances, though familiarity has come close to concealing that from us. Familiarity can, however, be no excuse for failure to appreciate its thematic inventiveness, its wonderful melodies and its subtlety of mood, amongst other qualities. Certainly Ehnes’s performance brought out both the passionate quality of much of Mendelssohn’s writing, the sheer wit of other passages, and the meditative inwardness of the andante. We have all heard performances of this concerto which, while thoroughly accomplished technically, sounded decidedly routine; not here, where there was an abundant freshness and commitment and much persuasively expressive playing. Ehnes was playing the “Ex Marsick” Stradivarius of 1715, and he drew from it sounds of extraordinary tonal beauty, always in the service of the work itself. In short, Ehnes gave us pretty well everything one could want in a performance of the work – subtlety, delicacy, emotional range, long lines, beautiful (but not self-indulgent or attention-seeking) phrasing, glittering passage work, immense fluency and extraordinary tonal range. Throughout he received assured and sensitive support from Ashkenazy and the Philharmonia. Mendelssohn’s skilful transitions were adroitly managed and the sheer sparkle and fizz of the third movement were generated by soloist and conductor alike. Altogether this was an outstanding performance. It received - understandably – such applause that Ehnes gave the audience an unaccompanied encore, in the form of Paganini’s Caprice No.16. The technical demands clearly presented no problems to Ehnes, whether in the form of string skipping, chromatic slurs or complex arpeggios; indeed as he negotiated the first few bars with remarkable panache, I noticed a jaw or two drop amongst the orchestral violinists. Remarkable.

Glyn Pursglove