LSO/Davis/Uchida – 11th Dec 2011

The LSO and Colin Davis reunited with Mitsuko Uchida on Sunday night for the finale of her Beethoven Piano Concertos series, with Davis also bringing a riveting close to his Nielsen symphony cycle. First up, however, and following on from last week’s programming, was another Haydn ‘London’ symphony, this time No. 93 in D major. From the very outset this performance revealed just the sort of immediacy and nuance that had been missing in the LSO’s performance of No. 98 two Sundays ago. But while the opening movement demonstrated a compelling balance of restraint and drama, I felt the Largo that followed could have relaxed a bit more. On the other hand, the vigorous and richly scored minuet in the third movement seemed almost too restrained, while the finale definitely approached that necessary sense of urgency.

In their previous meeting one Sunday earlier, it fell to Uchida to salvage a slightly lackluster opening performance of the Haydn through some truly inspiring playing. This time round, the ever enthralling pianist was allowed to bring the whole concert to a close, with the first half ending instead with a performance of Nielsen’s Third Symphony. This is a somewhat different animal to the Second Symphony that came a week earlier: bold, strident and drawn out. The very opening, however, seems to have something else in mind, with its accelerating repeated-note motif building to an almost delusional intensity.

LSO/Davis/Uchida – 4th Dec 2011

With the continuation of both Colin Davis’ Nielsen Symphony Cycle and his and Mitsuko Uchida’s Beethoven Piano Concerto series, concertgoers might feasibly have forgotten about the Haydn symphony that was scheduled to commence Sunday night’s programme at the Barbican. So too, it seemed, did Davis and the LSO. It certainly wasn’t the most auspicious of starts to a concert that was eventually redeemed by Uchida’s captivating playing and Nielsen’s infectious and characterful Second Symphony.

The playing in Haydn’s Symphony No. 98, one of the composer’s twelve ‘London’ symphonies, wasn’t always strictly together in the first two movements, nor was it especially inspiring. Davis struck a somewhat listless impression, although he was more forthright in his direction in the third movement’s boisterous Minuet. Haydn’s typical playfulness was perhaps most effectively exploited in the Finale, although the accompanying backdrop to the solo violin’s charming interjections might have been a bit more incisive.

A more arresting level of music making was reached only once Uchida had sat down at the piano for her performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. Even in the seconds before she began to play, Uchida was seemingly able to capture the attention of the entire hall – orchestra included. She did full justice, in other words, to Beethoven’s unconventional yet masterful choice of starting the whole piece with a poignant and simple chordal theme in the piano.

Prom 27 – BBC Scottish SO/Runnicles

Following a night decidedly French in flavour, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra returned last night for its second Prom under Chief Conductor Donald Runnicles, this time boasting works by two German giants, Strauss and Brahms.

First up, however, was a new commission by Robin Holloway, whose Fifth Concerto for Orchestra admits to the influence of another Germanic composer, Arnold Schoenberg. Faced with a stipulation by the BBC that this work ought to be significantly shorter than its predecessor (which stands at an impressive ninety minutes), Holloway turned to Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces to provide the necessary example of ‘vast suggestion in brief duration’, as he puts it.

However, while Schoenberg’s Five Pieces may have formed the initial inspiration for Holloway’s kaleidoscopic work, there is no doubt that the influence of several other, chronologically disparate composers is likewise apparent. At times suffused with expressionist intensity, then to the lighter, Neo-Classically glimpsed polyphony of the fifth movement, numerous half-identifiable sound-worlds are somehow strung together and sublimated into a dense colour-canvas of sound. Holloway himself calls the Fifth ‘a sort of “colour symphony”’. Each of the movements is based on a sensory or psychological response to a strong, colour-defined visual impetus. The first movement expresses dense blackness, the second the ‘amorous green’ of a lawn in summer, the third the intense red of a newly painted pillar box, and so on.

Prom 19 – BBC Symphony Orchestra/Oliver Knussen

Prom 19 saw the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Oliver Knussen offer a characteristically thoughtful programme of twentieth-century music, of which Henry Wood – new music trailblazer that he was – would no doubt have been proud. It’s rather a shame that the festival founder’s lifelong dedication to promoting contemporary and seldom performed works isn’t shared so much by his festival-going public: not even Debussy’s captivating and inspirational evocation of swirling seas in La mer (the earliest written of all the works performed last night) was enough to fill what looked like scores of empty seats around the Royal Albert Hall. Certainly an opportunity missed, given the absolutely scintillating form in which the BBC SO finds itself at the moment.

The first half of last night’s Prom was comprised of music written in the 1920s, beginning with a pair of works by Honegger. Both were immersive and mesmerizing but offered completely contrasting sound worlds. Pacific 231 submits to a relentlessly hammering locomotion of sound that privileges rhythm above all other musical aspects. This futurist evocation of industrial progress never once threatened to veer out of control, and as the train built in speed, the detail of the passing landscape seemed to melt and give way to broader brush strokes, rendered in sound by an emphatic and triumphant brass section bawling out over the full orchestra. It’s a world apart, in both time and space, from the bucolic idyll that followed in the Pastorale d’été. There was some remarkable piano playing in this piece from the BBC SO, and some wonderfully measured hairpins from the strings in particular. There’s a rather earnest and limpid feel to this music and it was captured quite perfectly by Knussen and the orchestra: never was the playing too delicate, or affected, or seemingly self-conscious.

Philharmonia/Maazel – Mahler Cycle 2011

With the sheer number of Mahler performances on offer in this anniversary year, it is perhaps inevitable that a few will fall short. Nowhere might such an occurrence be more glaring than as part of the Philharmonia’s and Lorin Maazel’s current Mahler cycle. And although the cycle has thus far been fairly well received, Thursday night’s concert at the Royal Festival Hall (which included the beautifully immersive and rather more personal Rückert-Lieder, as well as the Fourth Symphony) didn’t quite live up to Maazel’s interpretation of the Sixth Symphony the week before.

Simon Keenlyside, appearing less than comfortable with his left arm in a rather cumbersome sling, took a while to warm up in his rendition of the Rückert-Lieder, with some fragile sounding breaks in register in the opening ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’. The occasionally gruff low note (most notably in ‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft’ and the final ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’) seemed to betray a general struggle in range, and the popular assertion that these songs sound better when sung by a decent mezzo is certainly not unfounded. However, having heard Keenlyside give a masterful and moving performance of the Rückert-Lieder with the Rotterdam Philharmonic at last year’s Proms, I would be tempted to put Thursday’s performance down to a slight lack in form on the night. Quite significantly, his cause wasn’t aided much by Maazel, who surely could have provided a more delicate accompanying backdrop. As it was, this very large Philharmonia ensemble was prone to swallowing up the baritone’s efforts at times. More importantly, I wasn’t wholly convinced by Maazel’s rather prosaic attempt to invest this music with the inward sense of withdrawal that the quieter numbers in particular call for.

The Schubert Ensemble – Dvořák/Enescu Series (pt.3)

While his career as a prodigiously gifted violinist and conductor (as well as pianist and teacher) earned him international renown, the music of George Enescu is too rarely performed in this country. Indeed, of the three Enescu works that the Schubert Ensemble has performed in the last few months as part of their series of concerts dedicated to Enescu and Dvořák, only two have ever been performed in London before.

There are numerous reasons for this neglect, extending in large part to Enescu’s own remarkable modesty and reluctance towards self-promotion, as well as practicalities concerning inefficiency in the publishing and recording of his work. As regards his posthumous reception at home, Noel Malcolm (author of the first, full-length English study of the Romanian composer) has written that “by insisting almost possessively on the national importance of [Enescu’s] work, [his compatriots] contribute to the false impression that he was, by European standards, a figure of merely provincial significance”. This points also to the rather more worrying chauvinist attitudes that have often predominated in Western art music, particularly concerning canon formation. Indeed, as far as his compositions are concerned, for many years Enescu was known only for the folksy Romanian Rhapsodies. With this in mind, the Schubert Ensemble’s recent concert series has been truly enlightening and no doubt an absolute revelation for scores of concertgoers.

Monday night’s concert at the Wigmore Hall (the third and final instalment of the series) presented Enescu’s gloomy yet deeply luxurious wartime Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 29, flanked by Beethoven’s Allegretto for piano trio in B flat and Dvořák’s colourful and ever popular Piano Quintet in A, Op. 81. The Beethoven was simplistic in its rendering, and although quite beautiful it seemed to be lacking that extra something, particularly in the piano part. I might have done with a fraction more time being given to certain pauses and the ends of phrases, but otherwise this was a consummate performance, with some exquisite melodic playing in the violin and cello.

Soloists of the Bavarian RSO/Uchida

A boundless sense of enthusiasm and self-effacement is perhaps what struck me most about Mitsuko Uchida and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra’s performance at the Royal Festival Hall on Friday evening. So, with two inherently optimistic works programmed for Sunday night’s chamber concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the soloists of the Bavarian RSO and Uchida were hardly going to disappoint.

Beethoven’s Piano Quintet in E flat, Op. 16, for piano, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, is certainly one of the most optimistic works in the composer’s oeuvre, and it was upbeat playing all the way with this ensemble of remarkably fine musicians. The sudden key changes in the opening Allegro were articulated with startling precision and vigour, genuinely surprising each time they came around. The charming Andante cantabile was for the most part utterly beguiling (Uchida’s solo passages in particular seemed suspended in time), while the hunting-theme finale was suitably exuberant. It was clear from the start how much this ensemble relished playing together, with each musician able to bring something individual to the performance. Uchida’s exchange of melodic lines with clarinettist Stefan Schilling was often sublime in its simplicity, while Ramón Ortega Quero’s oboe playing frequently boasted a sustained resonance and a bewitching delicacy of tone, as did Eric Terwilliger’s blissfully relaxed horn playing.

This was a rather Classical sounding Beethoven, to be sure, and I wondered if this performance could have done with more of that reckless, firebrand quality that modern audiences have come to expect of a composer so often depicted as that most rugged and convention-defying of musical iconoclasts. But then we may not have experienced such a huge range of dynamic gradation, with Uchida in particular providing and prompting some exquisite piano playing, which in turn placed any louder sections in dramatic relief. Either way, if it wasn’t altogether accentuated in the quintet, this taste for Romantic zeal certainly seemed to come more to the fore in Schubert’s expansive and delectable Octet in F, D.803.