SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Roussel, Holt, Sibelius: Robert Plane (clarinet), Philippe Schartz (flugelhorn), Orchestra of Welsh National Opera / François-Xavier Roth (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 12.11.2010 (GPu)

Roussel, Bacchus et Ariane, Suite No.2

Holt, Centauromachy

Sibelius, Symphony No.2

In some comments from the stage before the concert began, François-Xavier Roth spoke of the evening’s programme as representing the music of three countries: France (Roussel), the U.K. (Holt) and Finland (Sibelius). True enough, in one sense. But in another sense such differences in the nationality of the three composers mattered rather less than what the music had in common and that was something we might think of in terms of the Mediterranean being a kind of shared ‘territory’. The classical mythology of Roussel’s familiar ballet music and of Simon Holt’s new piece (here receiving its premiere) has obvious associations with the waters and lands of mare nostrum. And, for all, the talk (which Sibelius himself firmly rejected) that saw the Second Symphony as a musical statement of Finnish patriotism, it is pertinent to remember that the work was, in effect, the product of Sibelius’ (and family) journey to Italy, courtesy of the funds raised by Baron Axel Carpelan, much of the being sketched in Italy (though not yet thought of as music designed for a new symphony).

In many ways the centrepiece of the concert was Simon Holt’s new work, Holt having been Composer-in-Association of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales for the last few years. The Centaur has resonated in the human imagination (one might even say within the human memory) for many centuries now. It is there in the canonical texts of Greek literature (such as the Iliad or the Idylls of Theocritus); it survived (and flourished) after its transplantation to Rome as, for example, in Ovid’s great and hugely influential poem, the Metamorphoses. It is potent in the Renaissance imagination – as in Botticelli’s ‘Pallas and the Centaur’ (in the Uffizi) or Michelangelo’s marble relief of ‘The Battle of the Centaurs’ (now in the Casa Buonarotti in Florence). It was the subject of at least one baroque opera, Draghi’s Il trionfatore de’ centauri of 1674. Later, to pick just a few examples, it abounds in the work of Picasso – in prints, drawings, pottery and elsewhere. There are poems galore about centaurs – by Yeats, Heredia, H.D., Jean Garrigue, Theodore Roethke and many others. At a more popular level the presence of centaurs is insistent too; they inhabit the Forbidden Forest near Hogwarts in the Harry Potter novels, and they are a very important dimension of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series. They endure in our minds and art because they continue to speak about many issues – about the inherent duality of human nature; about the continuity (whether or not we want to see it in terms of evolution) between the animal and the human; about that bond, so crucial to the development of human civilisation, between man and horse, and about much else. That the centaur should fascinate a composer like Simon Holt, who has more than once made musical use of the materials of mythology, need hardly surprise us. In a note contributed to the programme he writes of them as creatures that “combine, simultaneously, two distinct natures in one body. This may account for, on the one hand, their wisdom, making them intelligent teachers, while also making them impulsive and lustful, trapped in a kind of limbo between their two inherent natures: wild and yet capable of civilised behaviour” (one might, of course, say much the same about human beings). Holt’s Centauromachy refers to the legendary battle between the centaurs and the Lapiths – remembered most directly in the fourth (‘Pitched battle’) of the work’s five sections. The device of the double concerto has an obvious aptness to the centaur, the two instruments representing the presence of two natures in the one ‘body’ of music, though Holt avoids any temptation to let either instrument stand simply for ‘horse’ or ‘man’. The choice of clarinet and flugelhorn as solo instruments makes possible music in which the two soloists produce tonally overlapping sounds, sounds which, eyes closed, one wouldn’t always be able to allocate with certainty to the instrument producing them – any more, just as the humanity and the horsiness of the centaur flow into one another without easy and definitive distinctions. In the first movement of Centauromachy (‘Two natures’) an unaccompanied duet for the soloists the music is full of echoic patterns interwoven in ways which sometimes impress the listener as competitive, and sometimes feel like complementary elements fusing to make a whole; in the second, ‘Chiron’s dream’, Holt’s aural imagery alludes to one of the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, Chiron, who served as tutor to Hercules, Achilles and Jason, amongst others. Perhaps the most immediately beautiful (at least on a single hearing) of the work’s movements is the third, ‘A centaur glimpsed through trees’ which, from its haunting opening, and through a patchwork of short phrases and silences, the soloists playing brief unison passages before their paths take them different routes through the trees, as it were, only to come together again as the movement closes with a return to the music that opened it. ‘Pitched battle’ effectively divides the orchestra, the upper strings and the woodwinds (largely) supporting the clarinet, the brass, the lower strings and the percussion siding with the flugelhorn; the harp is strikingly deployed behind both soloists, as it is at the beginning of the final movement (‘Elegeia’), an elegy for Chiron, for what is lost perhaps in a world without ‘real’ centaurs, what has been lost in those ages of humanisation which have succeeded the age of centaurs; the music is poetic, a dignified, even ceremonial lament; the duetting soloists close the work, echoing the duet which began the first of the five movements. The whole is a musical meditation on, a kind of re-enactment in the language of music of, the resonances of this profound myth, in a structure intelligent and lucid, but full of delightfully complicated, and complicating, detail. The two soloists gave bravura performances, virtuosic as far as technical matters go, and sensitive both in their creation of emotion and in the intimacy of their dialogue. The conducting of François-Xavier Roth and the playing of the orchestra were exemplary, so far as I could judge without access to a score. I very much hope that there will, before too long, be further opportunities to hear the work.

The concert had begun with a performance, full both of energy and textural delicacy, of the second of Roussel’s suites from his ballet Bacchus et Ariane. The opening pages were as dreamy and hushed as one could wish but the motoric rhythms of later passages were, conversely, as hard-driven (without any loss of classical grace) as one might desire. The playing of the woodwinds (and of Lesley Hadfield as solo violinist) were worthy of particular note, but the whole orchestra gave a performance which respected both the fastidiousness and the passion of Roussel’s score. The Bacchus and Ariane suites have always seemed to me the kind of ballet music which, when listened to in the concert hall, is best served by forgetting about the details of the narrative and concentrating on the musical structures, especially the shaping rhythms, on the gestural implications. Do that and, with a performance as good and sympathetic as this one, one hardly misses the dancers!

Less wholly satisfying, but very interesting, was the performance of Sibelius’ Second Symphony which closed the concert. This was mush less obviously ‘Finnish’ than most performances of the work. François-Xavier Roth clearly never forgot the works Italianate origins, so that there was, indeed, much that was ‘mediterranean’ about this final element in the programme, almost as if it were a kind of symphonic poem to Italy, or Sibelius’ ‘Italian Symphony’, a la Mendelssohn. There was space and sun in the opening allegretto, a sheer business of activity and quick passion, building quickly and dying away just as quickly. The dominant note was of relaxation and liberation. The slow movement seemed to embody landscapes of stillness and dynamism, like cloudscapes passing across a dramatic Italian landscape. Other performances have certainly found greater emotional depths in this movement (and in the work as a whole) than were altogether evident in this performance but I, at least, was persuaded of the validity of this interpretative approach, even if, finally, I found it a rather partial account. The contrasts between momentum and pastoral repose in the third movement again communicated a sense of joy and expansiveness and in the last movement, where the sense of return to the North is surely inescapable, Roth’s reading persuaded one that the affirmation of the lithely played main theme was personal more than political, the affirmation of an artist who had found new aspects of himself, who as a result of his time in Italy understood himself and his native land somewhat differently. This was not a reading of the symphony that might satisfy repeated hearings – one would surely become too conscious of those dimensions of the work to which it failed to do justice – but it was one that made perfect sense as the conclusion to this particular programme, to this particularly interesting and distinctive concert.

Glyn Pursglove