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
Martinù, Concerto for piano trio and string orchestra
Painter, Furnace of Colours, Op.71 (BBC Radio 3 commission: world premiere)
Lutosławski, Symphony No.3
This concert included a world premiere, a work that failed to put in
an appearance at its intended premiere and a work that achieved
major status from the moment of its premiere.
An enjoyable afternoon concert (recorded for future broadcast on
Radio 3, split between the afternoons of 5th April and 16th
May) began with the lost-and-recovered Concerto for Piano Trio
and String Orchestra by Martinù. Written during Martinù's years
in Paris - early in 1933 - to a commission from the Hungarian Trio
it was rejected (unaccountably) by Martinù's publisher. (Another
account has Martinù losing the manuscript as the date of the
performance approached). Martinù promptly rewrote it as his
Concertino for Piano Trio and String Orchestra - and this was
played at the scheduled premiere. The ur-version disappeared and was
forgotten about, until it turned up posthumously amongst the
composer's papers. It was premiered some thirty years late at the
Lucerne festival in 1963. Admirers of Martinù have every reason to
be pleased at its rediscovery, for it is a fine work, a
distinguished contribution to the relatively select tradition of the
triple concert, and full of that astringent sweetness that so often
characterises Martinù's 'French' works. Its wit and its exuberance
were well articulated by the Atos Trio and the BBC National
Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Jac van Steen, from the sprightly
accents of the opening allegro to the momentum and drive of its
final movement, which is one of Martinù's best re-writings of
Baroque conventions, its canonical writing full of pleasantly tart
harmonies. The Atos Trio also responded very convincingly to the
beautiful yearnings of the andante and to their substantial
contribution to the third movement, with a trio for the Trio framed
within an orchestral scherzo. The whole work has about it an
exhilarating fluency and joie de vivre - qualities well celebrated
in this performance.
The concert closed with Lutosławski's Third Symphony. This
was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Lutosławski
began to sketch ideas for the work as early as 1972, but didn't
complete it until January 1983. It was immediately recognised as a
major work - one reviewer of the first performance observed that
"the 30 minute symphony is so dazzling in its originality, so
powerful in its use of the orchestra's resources and so remarkable
in its ability to communicate that a person had to think of it
immediately as a 20th Century masterwork" (Joe Cunniff).
Written as an uninterrupted single movement (though four distinct
sections can fairly readily be discerned, so that there is a clear
allusion to traditional symphonic structure), the work has about it
that paradoxical presence of opposites so typical of major art -
here the reconciled polarities include the violent and the tender,
the public and the private and, in particularly interesting fashion,
tightness of structure and elements of limited aleatorism for
individual players. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales made a fine
1995 recording of the work, conducted by Tadaaki Otaka. The playing
in this live performance was of a similarly high standard, and the
fortissimo repeated Es that begin and end the symphony made a
memorable impact. Whether handling Lutosławski's complex and
turbulent masses of sound or his moments of delicate lyricism. Jac
van Steen's control of the work was exemplary, though there were
moments when transitions seemed less organic than they might have
been. But this was an exciting reading of a fascinating work.
The actual premiere featured in the concert was Furnace of
Colours by the Welsh composer Christopher Painter (b.1962).
Painter studied at what was then University College, Cardiff under
Alun Hoddinott. He was long associated with Hoddinott in many
capacities. When the Hoddinott Hall was opened in Cardiff's
Millennium Centre in 2009 Painter edited a volume of essays and
reminiscences of Hoddinott, also entitled The Furnace of
Colours: Remembering Alun Hoddinott. In it Painter wrote of how
he had had "the great privilege and pleasure of knowing Alun for
over 27 years as his pupil, copyist, publisher, and most
importantly, friend". In a brief onstage interview (with harpist
Catrin Finch) before this premiere, Painter spoke of the work as
being the last of four dedicated to his memories of Hoddinott. As
such it follows on from his third symphony, premiered in 2010, which
was also grounded in a poem by Watkins (Fire in the Snow).
As Painter acknowledged, Furnace of colours
contains some echoes of Hoddinott, and is musically in direct line
of descent from him, without being merely derivative. It takes the
form of a setting, for soprano and orchestra, of a sequence of three
poems by Vernon Watkins, first collected in Watkins's Affinities
of 1962, under the full title of Music of colours: Dragonfoil
and the Furnace of Colours. Painter's setting is full
of colourful orchestral writing, in range and texture alike. The
music responds well to one dimension of Watkins's sequence, its
evocation of the heat-haze of a long summer's afternoon/evening,
when "all is entranced [. . .] mazed amid the wheatfield". Claire
Booth's delivery of the vocal lines was impressive in its range from
the declamatory to the intimate, and Jac van Steen's conducting
complemented her well in a work lasting more than thirty minutes.
But there is another dimension to Watkins's poems too; a dimension
hinted at in the poems' use of words of full of energy and even
implicit violence - words like "springing", "sprung", "flying",
"breaking", "torn" and "destroying". This aspect of the poems was
largely ignored in Painter's setting. Perhaps this was because he so
powerfully conceived of the work as a kind of elegiac farewell to
Alun Hoddinott; or perhaps it simply didn't interest him. But
ignoring it resulted in a setting which was largely homogenous in
tone and manner. The last stanza of the first of Watkins's three
poems ends thus:
Far off, continually, I can hear the breakers
Falling, destroying, secret, while the rainbow,
Flying in spray, perpetuates the white light,
Ocean, kindler of us, mover and mother,
Constantly changing.
That sense of endless change, of destruction and renewal, which runs
through Watkins's sequence as a counterpoint to the poems' evocation
of a magical stillness, was what I missed in Christopher Painter's
setting. That said, Painter's song-cycle had some ravishing moments
and packed a fair emotional punch. I suspect that Hoddinott would
have been pleased by it, and would have appreciated this committed
performance, which lost nothing by being performed in the hall named
for Hoddinott and opened soon after his death.
Glyn Pursglove