CBSO, Gražinytė-Tyla, BBC Proms review - expectations teased, seldom fulfilled | reviews, news & interviews
CBSO, Gražinytė-Tyla, BBC Proms review - expectations teased, seldom fulfilled
CBSO, Gražinytė-Tyla, BBC Proms review - expectations teased, seldom fulfilled
Birmingham’s great orchestra and its conductor are on top form, but substance falters
Nominally, this was a programme of three symphonies. The first, though, sounded like music re-cut and pasted from a very British film and the second was a suite, albeit impressively reworked, from an opera.
Would “the Gipps Second Symphony” have made a reappearance had its composer been called Ralph and not Ruth? She is remarkable for her very proactive place in the history of 20th century British music, but not, surely, for music itself. Though sprucely conducted and phrased, her ideas in this symphony are cut-price Vaughan Williams (one is reminded, incidentally, that he did actually use music from a film in his Seventh Symphony, but the score for Scott of the Antarctic is remarkable in the first place). You may think it's all too easy to reach for the "sounds like.." comparison, but when there's real individuality to be found, that isn't necessary.
The loose narrative of Gipps’s experience in the Second World War – the work was composed in 1945 – brings little conflict; when a side-drum starts up an alla marcia after the main business of the opening sequences, you think you might be in for a Nielsen or Shostakovich scrap, but it’s only jolly soldiers going off to war. The Adagio is sorrowful and brief before a predictable affirmation; compactness is this one-movement symphony’s chief virtue. But that’s not enough. The previous evening, I’d caught up online with the last concert of the Estonian Festival Orchestra at the Pärnu Music Festival, which ended with Swedish composer Berwald’s Fourth (“Naïve”) Symphony, composed exactly a century before the Gipps. It teems with happy personality and quirkiness; that's "modern" for you. There’s nothing original about this justly neglected work at all, though it was right for the CBSO to honour a symphony it premiered.
Thomas Adès (pictured right by Marco Borggreve) continues to forge arresting sounds and to master a sense of dark unease even beneath glittering pastiche. His opera The Exterminating Angel, bravely taking Buñuel’s surreal thriller of a film as its subject, is compellingly original, far more so than the relatively conservative take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest; the eponymous figure stalks bourgeois guests trapped for no palpable reason in a big house after a dinner party. Extracting music from it for concert purposes seemed as promising as Birtwistle’s work on Gawain’s Journey; in both cases the often hideously awkward, too-instrumental vocal writing can be forgotten.
Yet in spite of the Death-Angel’s subterranean lourings, a pattern not easily discerned, the four movements of the new “Symphony” feel like four unconnected mood-pictures from the opera. Prokofiev thought of calling his Third Symphony at one point “Fiery Suite”, having taken material from his infernal opera The Fiery Angel still wrapped in its creepy, cabbalistic dress. But that’s symphonic throughout, while each of these movements entertains and mildly disconcerts, the effect remains suite-like.
The brilliant Spanish inflections of the chaconne in “Entrances” outstay their welcome, though the queasy descent to the lower strings at the end is a standout. Extractable, certainly, is the double-side-drum-laden apocalyptic assault of the “March”, based on ritual drumming from the town of Calanda. Detached from its dying-lovers context, the “Berceuse” seems too vague in its disquiet. “Waltzes” is a brilliant composite, Ravel’s La Valse decomposing from the start, with a bewitching lullaby dropback before the final whirl into the abyss. All sounds gloriously rendered by the CBSO and authoritatively mastered by Gražinytė-Tyla, it’s a macabre entertainment, but without the depth it rseems to strive for – that we’re still awaiting from the prodigious composer. This was the second performance; the world premiere took place in Birmingham the night before.This Brahms Third bewitched in its inner movements; Gražinytė-Tyla found the perfect calm flow for both, took the lovely colours ever more hypnotically into another world – she would be right, surely, for the introspective side of the Elgar symphonies – and let her players sing their hearts out. That was reassuring after a first movement which only eventually flew, which needed more grounding and – from where I was sitting in the Albert Hall – better blending of strings and brass. Intrusive lighting fought against the necessary mood too: really, blood-red for Brahms? It feels as if too much this year is geared towards online viewing: a little visual help doesn't go amiss, but they've gone too far in 2021.
Surely the opening is the most difficult to conduct of any symphony: how to nail that tense and release reflex, that rolling mix of happiness and sorrow? It didn’t quite come off here, and our conductor's symmetrical semaphoring with both arms didn't seem to fit with what we were hearing (musicians find the technique unorthodox, but it usually works). Lyrical counterthemes in both outer movements could have done with a bit more air, even better articulation – though the venue makes that difficult; the final, recollected-in-tranquillity violin statement of the opening idea couldn’t be heard, only the reiterated F major chords closing the work. Admirable of Mirga, all the same, to highlight so sensitively Brahms’s brown studies and to choose a non-flashy pillar of the repertoire for a return to the Proms which merited some reflection.
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Comments
A small point, but RVW's
That was corrected some while
That was corrected some while ago. And a moral debt is one thing, but wasting 20 minutes of a valuable Prom on a second-rate work is something else. Still, we've had worse premieres and it was engagingly played.
One might argue that the CBSO
There are surely some
There are surely some objective standards here beyond mere taste, though, Richard, surely? That it lacks an original voice is beyond question. It's also well enough crafted. And I don't subscribe to the theory that 'one-day butterflies', as Prokofiev put it, should have an artificially extended life. Like I wrote, I've admired all else Mirga has done - but I wouldn't trust any musician who thought this was an 'unjustly neglected' work. Right now, when we need to hear orchestras at full pelt again, why not an established mastepiece like Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem?
But David, the criteria by
The review reflects how I
The review reflects how I feel about it. Whatever people like in a completely unoriginal work doesn't interest me. To bring seriously major voices like Mahler and - yes, the late-romantic but originl Franz Schmidt into it seems beside the point. I'm reminded of when Shostakovich, at the premiere of yet another 'one-day-butterfly' work by the Borodin Quarter, asked them if they'd played all the Haydn quartets yet (they hadn't). The comparison is meaningful because I certainly don't know all 104 of Haydn's symphonies, but I know there are beautiful and original things in all the ones I've recently heard for the first time. Let's not waste time on the second-rate when the entire output of the greats still isn't heard often, if at all.
I thought the Ruth Gipps
The thing is that many (by no
The thing is that many (by no means all) of the 'unjustly neglected composers' HAVE no personal identity. An idea from an individual soul strikes the listener; the generic does not, however pleasing. We've had way too much subfusc British (and American) music revived, and I'm afraid this is in that category.
Re the passing comment about
Others have already raised
Others have already raised this issue in comments on the First Night here. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I didn't really notice then, but i was more vexed by the lighting in this Prom. And the monstrous great black arm of the giant camera which takes up half the arena swinging around above my head - kind of worked in conjunction with The Exterminating Angel...
no one has mentioned the much