A deeply moving exploration of Beethoven's despair, plus the best of July’s classical concerts
Aurora Orchestra/Nicola Benedetti, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★★
Beethoven’s violin concerto may be among the most frequently played of all violin concertos, but it was a fair bet that in the hands of the country’s favourite violinist Nicola Benedetti and our most stylish and innovative orchestra it would come up fresh and new. And so it did. This was the most exciting performance of the concerto I’ve heard in years.
Part of the reason it worked so well is that it was preceded by a piece composed in homage to Beethoven which captured the tragedy of his deafness, and so made the violin concerto shine all the brighter. No.52 (3 Pieces about Ludwig van Beethoven: dreaming, hearing loss, and saying goodbye) was composed by the British composer Richard Ayres, who suffers from profound hearing loss himself. It was premiered at last year’s Proms, but this was its first performance in front of a live audience.
What made Beethoven’s loss so tormenting was its gradual but inexorable progress, which Ayres evoked through some striking musical metaphors. In the first movement we heard phrases of a vaguely 18th-century cast invaded by high-pitched sounds evoking tinnitus, played by the violins. The second incorporated a player on an electronic synthesiser whose sounds gradually decayed from a passable imitation of a piano to an appalling scratchy noise. The final movement was an assemblage of strange abrupt phrases mingling Beethoven heroics, dreamy washes of sound and scraps of “Für Elise”, heard in alternation with recordings of those phrases made to sound increasingly scratchy, like a record that is gradually worn down from overuse. There was a stubborn na?ve insistence in the procession of Ayres’s ideas, a deliberate lack of polish which caught the poignancy of Beethoven’s own naive and unpolished expressions of despair.
After a short pause the orchestra reassembled now without music stands, to play Beethoven’s concerto from memory. The most striking innovation, however, was in the overall spirit of the work. Conductor Nicholas Collon, Nicola Benedetti and the players invested it with a thrilling nervous energy. Benedetti turned on a sixpence from tiny tender sounds to romping energy, the orchestral sound had the pungent bite of a proper “period” orchestra, and together they played with a winning rhythmic flexibility, as if they were making the music up on the spot. She even invented her own cadenza (solo spot) for the first movement, where she duetted rumbustiously with the timpanist. It was a long way from the sublime “Olympian” serenity of most performances but it worked, wonderfully.
Nicola Benedetti and the Aurora Orchestra play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at St. Albans Cathedral on July 10. Info: stalbanscathedral.org
BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Cheltenham Festival ★★★☆☆
There’s something about the spacious rich sound of a string orchestra that perfectly evokes the “blue remembered hills” of an English landscape - which surely explains why the English love it so much. And if there’s an oboe and horn to add a touch of pastoral nostalgia, and a clarinet to suggest a cuckoo sounding somewhere in a dusky wood, so much the better.
This concert of English strings-plus music from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales offered all that, and a little more - but only a little. It didn’t venture into the modernist string sound of Harrison Birtwistle, or the dancing energy of Michael Tippett. Perhaps conductor Martyn Brabbins felt that the first public concert from the orchestra for 469 days was a moment to offer uncomplicated enjoyment to the audience, rather than challenging them - a stance many music directors have adopted in recent weeks, as their orchestras have come out of hibernation. And who’s to say that isn’t the wisest course?
The result in this case was 75 minutes of unclouded musical pleasure, ushered in by the drowsy bliss of Frederick Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. The orchestra was reduced a little in size to allow for social distancing but this hardly dimmed the richly side-slipping harmonies, and when clarinettist of Robert Plane sounded the cuckoo-call it seemed to come from a huge distance.
Pastoral calm was abruptly banished in the rarely-heard Concerto for two violins and strings from centenary composer Malcolm Arnold, who in the 1950s and 1960s seemed ubiquitous but whose star has sadly waned since. The performance from the orchestra’s leader Leslie Hatfield and co-leader Nick Whiting was beautifully nuanced but somewhat underpowered. Arnold’s piece has a huge almost uncouth emotional energy, the two violins’ impassioned duetting pushing against the stubbornly "wrong" surrounding harmonies, and it needs a corresponding fierceness in performance.
With Gerald Finzi’s Prelude the concert reverted back to melancholy but now of a gravely antique rather than pastoral-nostalgic kind. It was beautifully played, as was the very different Concertante Variations for five solo woodwinds and strings that followed. Its composer John Pickard creates perfectly crafted pieces of neo-classical elegance, which these days is about the most unfashionable thing a composer can do, but this louche dancing performance proved there are still fresh things to be said in that well-worn idiom. Flautist Philippa Davis, oboist Steven Hudson, clarinetist Robert Plane, bassoonist Jaros?aw Augustyniak and horn player Tim Thorpe did the piece proud.
Then came six minutes of something very un-English - the Mediterranean sultriness of Siesta, composed by the 24-year-old William Walton in 1926, its flickering harmonic colours and swaying rhythms nicely caught in this performance. Finally we had Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, the lightest and most evanescent of his masterpieces. The performance didn’t quite catch the yearning of the 1st movement, but Brabbins and the players certainly found the right fleeting sound for the close, creating the feeling of a delicious scent that vanishes before you can quite catch it.
(This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 later in the summer.)
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Debut Sounds: Bunker Music: Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆
We all want to believe that the pandemic is on the way out, but it’s still wreaking havoc on the performing arts — as this concert at the Royal Festival Hall showed. Brett Dean, the eminent Australian composer who had mentored the five composers showcased on Wednesday night, was forced to withdraw as conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra – he had to self-isolate after being notified by Test and Trace. Fortunately, the young conductor Jack Sheen stepped in and brought these complex pieces safely into port.
The pandemic itself was the inspiration for all five works. They were designed to be “musical reflections on a year of isolation”, and their subtle allusive style would have brought cheer to anyone who worries that the minimalism of John Adams is becoming the default idiom for young composers. There was not a chugging rhythm or tinkly repeated pattern in sight. And though there were occasional simple major or minor chords, they were glimpsed briefly, like flotsam in a surging sea of subtly layered, glistening sounds. It was a reminder of how electronic music and studio production have moulded the ears of younger orchestral composers.
And yet all five seemed haunted by classical music’s history. The first piece, entitled ‘patina (this is a golden age)’ by American composer Geoffrey King, began with a pure sound-gesture, like a sigh reinvented in orchestral sound, but soon an evocation of a Chopin nocturne emerged on the vibraphone, to be followed by the players all singing a nostalgic melody so quietly you couldn’t be sure you weren’t imagining it. Alexander Tay’s Witherbud, inspired by lines from Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel Watt, seemed at first more purely modernist in its intricate overlapping scales, which suggested a never-ending movement being constantly renewed, like a waterfall. But one could hear echoes of Bach in the weave – echoes that, at the surprise ending, became overt.
Polish composer Pave? Malinowski, in his filmed pre-performance chat, was the most insistent on the presence of old music in his own composition, ‘declined/restored\elapsed’, though it was harder to discern those echoes in the evanescent and mournful wisps of sound. In Robin Haigh’s Sleeptalker, by contrast, they were amusingly up-front. The beginning was like the theme tune to some lost 1970s Radio 2 series, but this familiar object was placed in an engagingly odd landscape of modernist fragments and other musical memories.
Chinese composer Sun Keting’s piece, ‘that which is unseen…’, was the most graspable of the programme on first hearing. Its evocation of the “empty space” at the heart of Japanese flower-arranging rose gently, if predictably, to quietly ecstatic fullness. The other pieces seemed more engaging in their colours and gestures than in their overall narratives, which often felt uncertain. But the seriousness of all these composers, and the sympathetic playing of the orchestra – half of whom were young players on the LPO’s Foyle Future Firsts mentoring scheme – was an inspiration. The pandemic may be terrible for the arts, but for this quintet, at least, it has brought a small silver lining.
No further performances