SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Rossini, Chopin, Berlioz: Orchestra dell’ Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Conductor –Antonio Pappano, Pianist –Lang Lang, Parco della Musica, Rome 24.10.2010. (JB)

Rossini, Semiramide overture

Chopin, First piano concerto

Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique

When I was preparing to take a junior piano exam at the age of about thirteen, one of the choices in the programme was a Chopin Nocturne, which I wanted to play. But Miss Chadwick said there was no way she would permit a pupil of hers to play Chopin in an exam. There are too many different interpretations, she added by way of explanation, and you never know which interpretation the examiner is expecting. Although I was an impossibly bumptious brat, I didn’t reply that it was exactly this that made me want the Chopin. The examiner would be treated to the Buckley interpretation. If he didn’t like it, that would be as much a judgement on him as on me. I think it was around this time that someone told me that most of these examiners were retired, deaf organists. Miss Chadwick said that what the examiners were looking for was a young pianist who played the right notes in the right place at the right time. I have to concede that she had a point here, though it did occur to me in my arrogant youth that what they were really seeking was what I would then have called a typist.

With Lang Lang, of one thing you may be sure: there is not the faintest possibility of the typist entering into the equation. At the beginning of the Chopin first concerto, the orchestra, though the same size as in the Rossini overture, suddenly sounded twice as big: Pappano gave us a weighty, almost Brahmsian, heavy texture. The pianist responded with a Beethovian, dramatic entrance which quickly adjusted to an almost perfectly studied cantabile for the second subject. Any schoolboy knows that Bellini was the major influence behind Chopin’s melodies, and possibly with Pappano’s encouragement, Lang Lang seemed to have absorbed something of bel canto style from the preceding Semiramide overture.

The Santa Cecilia players have something to teach anyone on this style: a magnificent quartet of horns, led by Guglielmo Pellarin, fine solo contributions from Alessandro Carbonare (clarinet), Franceso Bossone (bassoon) and above all, in the challenging piccolo solo, Davide Ferrario. The strings wove in and out of these wind soloists with due operatic commitment. Pappano delivered something of the excitement of Rossini’s opera in the ten minute overture.

The second movement of the concerto was the perfect vehicle for Lang Lang’s finely placed bel canto playing. This was as far away as you could get from a pianist whose detractors have dubbed him Bang Bang. The rondo finale, in contrast, to my ear, sounded a bit rough, a bit too aggressive even, for the joy of living feeling which Chopin invariably introduces into these Polish dances.

When Ivo Pogorelich played and then recorded the Chopin Preludes, he showed us that these pieces, which had long been thought to be slight and somewhat inconsequential, contained profound and enchanting musicality. It sometimes takes a maverick pianist to shed light in hidden places. In his choice of encore, Lang Lang joined these ranks. He played the Opus 25 no. 7 C sharp minor etude. This is the only Op 25 etude marked Lento, so it always provides a welcome contrast to the other eleven. Here it was doubly well received after the (uncalled for) bombastic rendition of the concerto’s finale. Restoring tranquillity in a tumultuous concert hall is always a challenge. But Lang Lang went daringly further. He introduced poise. The opening left hand melody is taken straight out of a cello solo in Bellini’s Norma. Pianists can never resist pounding the key here, milking it for all it’s worth. Not Lang Lang. He played it with poise. Three thousand people held their breath. Edith Sitwell’s evocative phrase comes to mind: a butterfly poised on a pigtail ocean.

I was first aware of the beauty of fine timpani performance some years ago in Salome at the San Carlo Opera in Naples. Jeffrey Tate, then the principal conductor of that theatre, told me that every guest conductor who came to Naples wanted to take the boy timpanist home with him. A few years ago Antonio Catone was successfully wooed by Santa Cecilia. Like the maverick pianists, he gives you timpani sound you would never have thought possible. The duet with the timpani and the orchestra’s recently recruited and excellent cor anglais, Simone Sommerhalder, at the end of the third movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, will live in the mind’s ear for ever. It was haunting. And haunting is what Berlioz’s symphony is about, by his own confession. Beautiful. Unique. Singularly expressive.

Fascinating that Berlioz’s symphony and Chopin’s first concerto were composed in the same year, 1830: they occupy different musical planets. My jury is still out on Berlioz’s experimental symphony: the excellence of the individual parts doesn’t always add up to a satisfactory, coherent whole. The result of some of Berlioz’s experimentation with melody is more interesting in theory than in practice. The piece is unquestionably a showcase for an orchestra. But the downside of this is that you hear the weaknesses as well as the strengths. In Santa Cecilia’s case, that is the first harp. And Berlioz certainly gives both harps a challenge in the second movement (the Ball), the only movement in which they play. Pappano’s solution to this impasse was to get the rest of the orchestra to play louder to cover up the harp mess, although I’m absolutely sure that sweeping the harps under the carpet was not part of Berlioz’s objective.

Antonio Pappano is an admirable musical architect and even manages to give Berlioz’s score convincing shape in places where it tends to get bogged down or seem to meander. The strings were in excellent form, as were the woodwind and brass. By the time you read this, the orchestra will be playing this programme in a short tour of Germany. Lucky Germany.

Jack Buckley