A programme of French music under the baton of the LPO’s talented young principal guest conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin should be a treat. Nézet-Séguin’s affinity for French textures and gestures has already been amply proved, as has the orchestra’s own aptitude for them, yet whatever was happening to the Fauré Requiem last night at the Royal Festival Hall was neither polished nor delightful. To attribute it simply to a bad day might be the kindest thing, but when you take into account the sold-out hall, the Saturday-night profile of the concert and all the people who had come to London’s major classical venue expecting a quality performance of core repertoire, such lazy musicianship deserves neither kindness nor the applause the audience gave so generously.
An “Army of Generals” suggests a kind of supergroup, a fighting force made up of leaders rather than followers. If Charles Hazlewood’s band, which has just started a residency at Bristol’s St George's, is such a host, then he presumably is the Generalissimo, primus inter pares, whose mastery is exercised with a showman's display of almost innocent ego.
We’ve all seen singers go wrong. Forgetting words, missing entries, skipping verses – it happens often enough, and is generally cause for little more than some awkward laughter and a second attempt. Never, however, have I seen a wrong entry (as ill-luck would decree, in the only sacred work of the programme) greeted with a resonant expostulation of “Oh, shit” from the performer, followed by minor audience uproar and many apologies. It wasn’t the finest moment of the evening for Juan Diego Flórez, but – loath though I am to admit it – it wasn’t the worst either.
Now I know why the BBC Symphony Orchestra slunk so easily into Piazzolla tango mode last Friday: they'd danced it under Latin American instruction four years ago. It's all part of their education department's annual Diverse Orchestras week, where performers from another culture come to open the players' fantasy and the onlookers get to learn something into the bargain. And learning has never been more fun than it was last night in the Tabernacle, Notting Hill's vibrant arts centre, where the Fez Andalusian Orchestra under one of the world's great string players, Mohamed Briouel, set a zinging example.
Valery Gergiev’s survey of the Tchaikovsky symphonies began here on a chilly January night with youthfully idealistic Winter Daydreams thrown into the sharpest relief against a disillusioned and angry Shostakovich whose own journey into the bleak mid-winter was, by the time he penned his Second Violin Concerto, very much a one-way ticket. Two revealing performances, one remarkable young violinist.
No doubt about it, Leonidas Kavakos is one of the world's top 10 live-wire violinists. But here in London he seems to have sold himself a bit short recently with a less than great concerto repertoire (Korngold, Szymanowski's Second). Korngold furnished a springy intermezzo in last night's blockbuster recital, Szymanowski a ravishing second encore, but I went to hear two giddying masterpieces, Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata and Schubert's Fantasy in C. If unknown quantity Enrico Pace could manage to play Richter to Kavakos's David Oistrakh, it might turn out to be awe-inspiring. He did, so it was.
The classical-music industry loves dead icons; witness the endless reissuing and remarketing of recordings by Kathleen Ferrier and Jacqueline du Pré. Canadian pianist Glenn Gould died from a stroke at the age of 50 in 1982 and his seminal Bach discs have never been out of the catalogue since. Françis Giraud told Gould’s story on screen before in his 1993 film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, an imaginative series of vignettes depicting scenes from Gould’s life.
The Sunday Afternoon Song Recitals are a wonderful Wigmore tradition. Filling in that tricky gap between lengthy weekend lunch and early school-night supper, they offer a chunky one-act programme, generous but without the fuss and faff of an interval. Balancing young talent with more established performers, the next few months see (among others) Emma Bell, Anna Grevelius and Isabel Bayrakdarian occupying this slot. Playing to the prevailing mood yesterday afternoon was repertoire from Gounod, Britten’s Cabaret Songs and the UK premiere of Iain Bell’s song cycle Day Turned Into Night. Sitting less comfortably however were Poulenc’s Quatre poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire which set proceedings off to a rather inscrutable start.
Mezzo-soprano Christine Rice is seen almost more often on the opera stage than the concert hall platform these days, working regularly for both the Royal Opera and ENO, most recently struggling against weak direction in Handel’s Radamisto. Her range and well-balanced tone make her a desirable soloist, but I still remain to be fully convinced by her acting skills.
These unfortunately were very much at issue in the Poulenc. Apollinaire’s poems are elusive; filled with fractured images and characters, they always seem to end prematurely, catching the listener unawares. Though game in her characterisation of the literal narratives – the gossipy backbiting of “L’Anguille”, the offhand vocal shrug of “Hôtel” – there was an absence where a coherent interpretation needed to be, a sustained tone or a musical gesture to make sense of these epics in miniature. Both she and accompanist Roger Vignoles however did bring demonstrable enjoyment to the set, with Vignoles’s delicate touch playfully highlighting the shift from furrowed-brow Neo-Classicism to music-hall vamping in “Avant le cinéma”.
More satisfying were Gounod’s 3 Mélodies, with their more solid Victorian sensibility. The long lines and caressing lyricism of “Au rossignol” showed Rice’s voice at its most finely spun, and gave us the first real encounter with the power that lies behind, released here to magnificent effect.
British composer Iain Bell’s song cycle Day Turned Into Night takes inspiration from the figure of Queen Victoria. Resolutely monochrome in the national imagination, Bell attempts to flesh out the caricatured black-clad figure with context, setting texts from the Queen’s correspondence leading up to her marriage and then following the death of her husband. It’s a novel idea, and one that gains weight from the surprisingly heartfelt writings. We start with the awkward formality of “My Dearest Uncle”, all truncated phrases and wilful rhythmic hesitations, strikingly at odds with the emotive account of the first meeting between Victoria and Albert. Emotions are allowed greater release in “The honeymoon night”, with its lingering repetitions in the accompaniment, before the mood darkens for the final three songs.
Bell’s harmonic language is unmistakably English, with the shadow of Britten falling over the subversive accompaniments and occasional glances toward bitonality. If there is nothing especially new here, then there is also much to enjoy; Bell’s understanding of vocal writing is evident, and Rice’s instrument a good fit for the cycle’s broad emotional arc.
Closing the afternoon were Britten’s Cabaret Songs, a series of virtuoso vocal feats masquerading as off-the-cuff musical musings and encore fodder. While technically secure, there were a number of interpretative quirks to the performance that didn’t quite ring true. The recitative-like sections in “Tell me the truth about love” for example, while encouraging expressive liberties also demand a certain metrical control if they are not to distort the work’s careful architecture. Pianist and singer parted company here (and later again in “Johnny”) and in each case I would be tempted to side with the more measured Vignoles (pictured above) than the runaway Rice. “Funeral Blues” can be a struggle for mezzos, sitting squarely on the lower break into chest voice. While the emotional tone, with its extrovert show of grief, was thrilling, the vocal mechanics were rather too much on show to allow listeners to surrender to the text.
I can think of few nicer ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than being given a leisurely tour through 19th and 20th-century European song by two such performers. While interpretatively I have my issues with Rice, there is no arguing with the glorious tone to her voice, especially the rounded power of its bottom register. Coupled with the elegant intelligence of Vignoles, the result is reliably delicious.
This was a programme born for marketing cliché: banish the winter blues by bathing in Latin American/Iberian warmth. And it turned out to be true, by virtue of an unexpected watershed. How did the BBC Symphony strings manage to be first among the London orchestras to slip into something truly sensual, whether tangoing with an Argentinian bandoneónist - "A what?" you may ask, and I'll tell you shortly - or dancing malagueñas with a Spanish pianist? Was it the after-effect of the John Wilson Hollywood treatment last Sunday, or just sheer joy in welcoming back the high, bright style of conductor Josep Pons?