SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Walton and Elgar: Paul Watkins (cello), Orchestra of Welsh National Opera / Andrew Litton (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 22.1.2010 (GPu)

Walton, Crown Imperial
Elgar, Cello Concerto
Walton, Symphony No.1


Just at the moment the capital of Wales is, musically speaking, doing its English neighbours very proud – not something to be expected in all areas of life. Last week the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by David Atherton, played Holst and Walton (with Alban Gerhardt as the soloist in the cello concerto); next week Vladimir Ashkenazy will conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra in a programme of music by Elgar (the Cockaigne overture and the first Symphony) and that honorary Englishman Mendelssohn (the violin concerto, with James Ehnes as soloist). In between, tonight’s concert was another all-English programme – again featuring Walton and Elgar.

Crown Imperial is good ‘occasional’ music – the occasion of its commissioning being the planned coronation of Edward VIII – though his abdication meant that it was actually played at the coronation of George VI on 12 May 1937, as the Queen Mother, Queen Mary made her entrance (it had actually had a first performance the previous month, played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra – Adrian Boult being the conductor on both occasions). It is an impressive march, more obviously ‘Elgarian’ than some of Elgar’s own work (such as the concerto succeeding it on this programme). It is hardly a piece of any great substance (separated from its public occasion), but it serves the purpose of a concert overture very well and was played with impressive punch and a fair degree of quasi-military grace. At the very least it could be said to be a good pipe-clearer for the orchestra.

Elgar’s use of the orchestra in the cello concerto is actually rather striking in its spareness – there are many passages which are almost chamber-music-like in scale and intimacy and Elgar tends to make more use of top and bottom ends of the orchestra than the middle-register, giving the soloist more ‘room’, as it were. Paul Watkins does not have a particularly big sound and it was in the many intimately-scored passages that he was at his most impressive. The opening adagio pages of the first movement were particularly good, passionate and fine-grained at the same time, a beautiful realisation both of the triple- and quadruple-stopped chords for unaccompanied cello which begin the work and the soloist’s melancholy variation’s on the theme introduced by the violas. The transition to the second movement was well handled by Litton; Paul Watkins’ playing in this movement had rather less of the convincingly dramatic about it than in some performances and throughout the work he was at his most convincing in the less outwardly demonstrative passages. The relatively brief adagio that forms the third movement was exquisite, Watkins phrasing his melodic lines beautifully and, without excessive flamboyance, fulfilling Elgar’s ‘molto espressivo’ marking; the close of the movement carried utter conviction in its muted tranquillity. Here was the finest point of a generally pleasing performance of the concerto. The last movement began impressively with the quasi-recitative writing for the soloist and Litton’s conducting brought out some accomplished work from the orchestra but the movement didn’t fully convince, its changes and contrasts of mood not carrying absolute conviction. All in all, this was a performance well worth the hearing, but which fell just a little short of ideal.

After the interval, Walton’s first Symphony: the work of which its first conductor, Hamilton Harty, observed that it had had “a difficult accouchement”. After Walton’s publisher, Hubert Foss, had suggested that he attempt a symphony (after the success of Belshazzar’s Feast), it was a long time before Walton wrote the first bars of it (he seems to have written the third movement first) and as Susanna Walton says “the symphony dragged on by fits and starts for three years”. The last movement gave Walton particular troubles. I don’t think it is only such knowledge of Walton’s difficulties that makes one aware of certain problems with what is a fascinating but slightly broken-backed work.

Andrew Litton and the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera responded well to the relatively loose fluidity of Walton’s music in the first movement, a movement characterised more by organic growth than classical formal qualities. There was a persuasive sense of the seeds of growth contained in the quiet opening, with its pianissimo drum roll and the undeveloped observations of horns, strings and oboe, and in the tumultuous music which follows there was plenty of energetic and disciplined playing and a sense of pent-up violence; Walton’s admiration of Prokofiev was very audible here; a few passages were perhaps very slightly underpowered, but there was a convincing feeling of ferocity in the conclusion, a sense of a ‘triumph’ which was yet very troubled, full of frustration. The second movement carries the unusual marking ‘con malizia’ (usually understood as having its origins in Walton’s failed relationship with Baroness Imma von Doernberg); it is perhaps worth remembering that the Italian word can convey the sense of ‘mischief’ as well as of ‘spite’ or ‘ill-will’, and Walton’s music perhaps speaks of scorn rather than pure malice, of mockery as much as of spite. The cross-rhythms of this movement were very well-handled, becoming a persuasive part of the emotional texture, a music of restlessness and discomfort, of comfort refused and scorned, before building to a climax of sardonic denunciation, in a performance that carried real conviction, a real sense of some of the corrosiveness of Walton’s writing here. The contemplative lyricism that dominates the slow movement lived up to Walton’s marking (andante con malinconia), its melancholy evident from the opening, weirdly lifeless utterance on the flute, as if the bitterness which informed the preceding movement had momentarily exhausted all energy, and later reinforced in the writing for the lower brass. The mood was never in danger of becoming at all self-indulgent, becoming any kind of luxuriating in self-pity; there is too much ‘acid’, even here, in Walton’s writing and that element was well respected in this performance. The intellect is always evidenced in the music, as well as the emotions, as a kind of aggressive self-awareness militates against the easy consolation of melancholy and this, again, was well articulated by Litton and the orchestra. The last movement (Walton sanctioned, even encouraged, a performance of the first three prior to its composition) was produced some time after its predecessors. Here Walton turns to a much more ‘classical’ conception of form, strangely at odds with what has gone before. In mood, too, it is radically different. The writing is altogether more declamatory; the personal poetry of the first three movements is replaced by public rhetoric. This last movement doesn’t so much resolve the issues raised in the previous three movements as change the terms of the argument. Nor does the fugal section of the movement seem very plausibly integrated with its context. It is as if Walton provided this music because symphonic form requires (or was felt to require) its presence rather than because he fully believed in it, believed in it as the necessary and proper destination of the musical and emotional argument that runs through the first three movements. Never having been convinced of the ‘rightness’ of this movement, it would have been unreasonable to have expected this performance to ‘convert’ me. Suffice it to say that Andrew Litton conducted it – as he had the earlier movements, with insight and intelligence and that the orchestra as a whole (most notably the strings and the brass) acquitted themselves well in meeting the demands of the music.

Glyn Pursglove