Other Links
Editorial Board
- UK Editors
- Roger Jones and John Quinn
Editors for The Americas - Bruce Hodges and Jonathan Spencer Jones
European Editors - Bettina Mara and Jens F Laurson
Consulting Editor - Bill Kenny
Assistant Webmaster -Stan Metzger
Founder - Len Mullenger
Google Site Search
SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT REVIEW
J.S. Bach, Bartók, Kurtag, Beethoven: Peter Donohue (piano), Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, Lothar Koenigs (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 21. 1.2011 (GPu)
Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No.3 in G major, BWV 1048
Bartók, Piano Concerto No 2 in G major
Kurtág, …quasi una fantasia…Op.27 No.1
Beethoven, Symphony No.7 in A major, Op.92
Since his arrival as
Music Director of Welsh National Opera in August 2009 Lothar Koenigs has
effected a tightening up of the orchestra’s work, especially in the concert
hall, and has put together some enterprising (and even adventurous) concert
programmes. Both virtues were in evidence on this particular occasion. The
programmes which Koenigs devises and conducts rarely give the impression of
being merely random (more or less) assemblages of works that he and the
soloist fancied playing or had as their party pieces. There is almost always a
keen sense of unified purpose to a Koenigs programme. On my way to Cardiff to
this concert I naturally looked for the golden thread here – but I needn’t
have made the effort, Koenigs’ own programme note was explicit enough: “This
concert is themed around the art form of the Concerto Grosso. We will see how
different composers have used it in vastly differing ways through the history
of music … More than 200 years after Bach wrote his piece, Bartók composed his
2nd
Piano Concerto,
combining Lisztian romantic virtuosity with elements developed from Bach’s
concerti grossi. György Kurtág follows Bartók’s tradition in ‘…quasi una
fantasia…’ a piece which quotes a Beethoven piano sonata. The concert will
climax with Beethoven’s magnificent
7th
Symphony”.
Certainly there would be few better places to start an evening with the
concerto grosso than with one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. The
concerto was played – on modern instruments – by three violins, three violas
and three cellos, with continuo of harpsichord and double-bass. All those
threes (of structure and pattern, as well as instrumental groupings) which
Philip Pickett has suggested embody allegorical allusions to the muses, the
music of the spheres, the trinity and much else were laid before us very
clearly. Yet the performance didn’t quite catch fire at any point, even it was
highly competent and started the evening very pleasingly.
The temperature rose considerably in the Bartók Second Piano
Concerto, with Peter Donohue as an excellent soloist. (I have more than
once felt that this is a piece which might reasonably have been designated a
Concerto for Piano and Timpani, and Patrick King’s interpretation of the
timpani part was so good, and made such a major contribution to the success of
this performance that such a feeling was more pronounced than ever). The first
movement, to which the strings make no contribution, had vivacity and vigour
in abundance, played with all the energy (and precision) that the music
requires. Contrapuntal structures were clearly delineated, but without any
loss of excitement and the rhythms spoke eloquently of Bartok’s Hungarian
roots (and perhaps of his familiarity with jazz too). Donohue’s playing of the
movement’s stunning cadenza was appropriately breathtaking and throughout the
work of the brass section (particularly) was of the highest order. The hushed
opening of the second movement had poise and a profound sense of space and
scale, and the ensuing conversation between pianist and timpanist felt,
mid-placed as it is, like the very heart of the work, its generative centre.
The playing of the woodwinds and the strings in this movement was very fine,
and beautifully integrated into the design of the whole by the conducting of
Koenigs. In the final allegro molto the echoings of material from the first
movement were evident without seeming at all forced and there was a teasing
but unmistakable logic to the way orchestra and soloist moved towards the
work’s optimistic conclusion (which for all the logic always seems surprising
in a good performance – as it did here). This, for me, was the musical
highlight of the evening, a memorable performance.
After the interval Kurtág’s ‘…quasi una fantasia…’ was accommodated
intriguingly in the spaces (and heights) of St. David’s Hall. The pointillist
fragility of the opening was well realised (with Peter Donohue as pianist),
simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable; the second movement was not quite so
successful, its spatial effects more intriguing than fully satisfying and one
or two slight imprecisions of entry; the third movement (marked recitativo)
had remarkable power, plangent funeral music dominated by brass and
percussion, with mournfully whispering strings and woodwinds; here, and in the
final ‘aria adagio molto’, Kurtág’s writing is at its most distinctive and
also at its most allusive; in the aria there are reminiscences of Bach as well
as of Beethoven, and the score’s prefatory quotation from Hölderlin’s
‘Remembrance’ fully befits this brief movement’s shoring up of fragments
against ruin, its meditative act of recall and restitution. Not perhaps a
perfect performance of the piece but a very good one, and how delightful to
find the piece placed so intelligently within a carefully designed concert
programme, where it could both illuminate, and be illuminated, by its
neighbours.
The closing performance of Beethoven’s Seventh had all the onrushing
continuity, all the momentum, that Kurtág’s fragments and silences designedly
lack. The spirit of affirmation, of joy, is everywhere in the work and, to a
great extent, Koenigs and his orchestra communicated the work’s exhilaration.
The performance had plenty of spring in its step, and moments of real
incandescence. But there were also moments, as once or twice in the vivace of
the opening movement that weren’t quite as lively or infectious as one might
have hoped. The opening of the allegretto was played with a pleasing sense of
authority, the work of the lower strings being especially impressive. In the
later phases of this movement Koenigs found both elegance and monumentality.
In the minuet Koenigs maintained an attractive and effective balance of
orchestral sections, though I did wonder whether the trio wasn’t just a little
too cosy and might have had more sense of the hymnal, bearing in mind that
Abbé Maximilian Stadler claimed some of the trio’s phrases to be based on a
pilgrim’s hymn from Lower Austria. The playing of the woodwinds here deserved
particular praise. Any minor reservations one might have had at points in the
first three movements were comprehensively swept away by a muscular,
insistently aggressive, but precisely controlled performance of the final
movement, very definitely allegro con brio.
Cardiff is very fortunate to have two professional orchestras capable of
working to high standards and doing so consistently; two orchestras, too, that
can sometimes rise above merely high professional standards and play with
something like inspiration. Koenigs and the present orchestra of Welsh
National Opera seem to be partners well-suited to one another.
Glyn Pursglove