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Alix Goolden Performance Hall
April 30, 2011
In his 1948 play The Linden Tree, J.B. Priestley has his principal character, aging history professor Robert Linden, whose daughter is practising the work offstage, describe Elgar's Cello Concerto as:
a kind of sad farewell. An elderly man remembers his world before the war of 1914, some of it years and years before perhaps - being a boy at Worcester - or Germany in the nineties - long days on the Malvern Hills - smiling Edwardian afternoons - MacClaren and Ranji batting at Lords, then Richter or Nikisch at the Queen's Hall - all gone, gone, lost for ever - and so he distils his tenderness and regret, drop by drop, and seals the sweet melancholy in a Concerto for cello. And he goes, too, where all the old green sunny days and the twinkling nights went - gone, gone.
Which is all well and good, not to mention a highly poetic description of a great piece of music, but it does little to explain the enduring popularity and affect of the work almost a century after those "old green sunny days and the twinkling nights" disappeared for ever.
Here we have an insight into that paradox of great music: that it can be both particular and universal simultaneously; for a listener of Elgar's generation Linden's description probably conveyed exactly what they heard in the music. Yet the music can still speak directly even to those of us for whom that pre-war world is nothing more than history. The sense of loss is common to all humanity.
Of course a mediocre or bad performance (and I have heard a few) is unlikely to convey any of the preceding.
Fortunately, Saturday's performance by Jacinta Green with the Civic Orchestra conducted by Giuseppe Pietraroia was anything but mediocre.
Green's playing of the work's famous opening gesture, as indeed it should, gripped the attention and throughout she displayed total familiarity with, and considerable insight into, the music. Moreover, she has a fine tone, which I don't recall ever coarsening, a good sense of rubato and even of portamento; old-fashioned though it may be accounted today, Elgar would most certainly been accustomed to and expected it.
It was almost disconcerting to observe one so young playing this particular music with such intensity and sympathy. What was perhaps even more disconcerting was to notice, more than once, the odd tear running down my cheek. (And let me note parenthetically that while I might - by birth and upbringing - be predisposed to respond to Elgar's particularly English idiom, I have been known to sit stoney-faced through a lesser performance.)
Elgar was one of history's great orchestrators, but that does not make the accompaniment easy. Yet Pietraroia led his players through the potential minefields with a sure and steady hand. Their sound was as good as I've ever heard and ensemble, even in the more hair-raising parts of the second and fourth movements - both taken at fairly brisk tempos - was all but immaculate.
This was a very fine and truly moving performance of a great masterpiece.
If I say that I was not anticipating Brahms' Symphony No.2 to quite the same degree as the Elgar, the fault is surely within me.
For some reason which I cannot quite fathom, I rarely seek out Brahms to listen to, although at any one time there is usually a handful of exceptions (currently it is the clarinet trio and quintet and the first two violin sonatas). Having said which, when I do encounter Brahms, I rarely come away disappointed.
The second symphony, though, at least in prospect, does not thrill. Brahms' orchestration usually strikes me as being cast almost entirely in shades of brown; in this symphony it is more like shades of sepia.
It is to the credit of Pietraroia and his orchestra that my reservations about the music were fairly quickly swept away. Although the playing in the opening movement occasionally suggested that the musicians had given their all in the Elgar, which led to some rather cluttered textures, matters did improve and Pietraroia's generally well-chosen tempos were thoroughly convincing.
By the time the third movement was reached, we were well back on track, with positively bright orchestral colouring and a bouncy (not a word one tends to associate with Brahms) central trio.
The finale was the best of all - despite some slightly shaky intonation - with plenty of energy, particularly in the final coda, which provided a splendid close to the afternoon.
The concert opened with a very fine performance of Dvoràk's Carnival Overture, well-paced and with some quite delicious orchestral textures.
I may only have been able to attend a single concert of the Civic's season this year; I am very glad indeed that it was this particular programme, which exceeded my already high expectations. Wonderful.
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