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First Metropolitan United Church
November 21, 2014
"I never knew how big the piece was!"
This was Sir Edward Elgar's reaction on hearing the first recording of his own Introduction and Allegro for Strings. The recording was made in 1926, some eighteen years after the work was premiered, by John Barbirolli and his Chamber Orchestra. Barbirolli was a lifelong Elgar devotee: he had played in the London Symphony Orchestra when they accompanied the premiere of Elgar's Cello Concerto and was himself only the second cellist to undertake the work; he was to record the Introduction and Allegro six times in all, believing in the work when apparently few others did.
Yariv Aloni may be a violist, rather than a cellist, but he also has the string player's innate understanding of the music and a vast empathy with Elgar and indeed English music in general. These were both on display in Friday's spectacular performance of the Introduction and Allegro, which brought to a close the Victoria Chamber Orchestra's glorious all-English programme.
From the wonderful tutti "crunch" which opens the piece - is there a more dramatic opening to any string work? - to the final pizzicato, this was a performance in which everything went right; of course, having the Lafayette String Quartet play the solo quartet is a distinct advantage to any performance, but this was undoubtedly a collective triumph.
The performance was full of lovely individual touches - such as the slight tenuto just before the allegro begins - but it was the overall conception, the way the music simply swept all before it, which made this a reading to treasure. Throughout, the transitions between the various sections were superbly handled and, if the opening of the "devil of a fugue" (the composer's own description) seemed just a tad deliberate, once again it proved to be Aloni's faithfulness to the score, which then enabled him to accelerate when directed, a dizzying effect which is rarely heard, as too many conductors begin the fugue too quickly and then have nowhere to go.
An inspired and inspiriting performance of, yes, a big piece.
The Elgar was the culmination of an evening which opened with the same composer's early (well, he was thirty-five, but Elgar was no youthful prodigy) Serenade for Strings.
After a very slightly hesitant opening, the performance very quickly settled down, the orchestra displaying lovely tones and excellent balance. The slow movement, the heart of the piece, was very slow, but there was no lack of pulse and Aloni's careful attention to dynamics reaped dividends.
The finale again displayed Aloni's marvellously natural sense of rubato and the sudden reappearance of the work's opening figure brought a delicious sense of nostalgia.
This was a very moving performance; I have heard Aloni conduct this music on at least two previous occasions, but each time he seems to dig just a little more deeply.
Benjamin Britten was an unusually gifted young composer; at the age of twenty he composed his Simple Symphony based on themes from music written even before he was in his teens.
It would be foolish to look for great profundity in the music, although the Sentimental Sarabande ("sentimental" having far less pejorative connotations in the 1930s) delves rather deeper than its young composer probably realised.
Aloni directed a lively performance. In the opening Boisterous Bourrée the contrapuntal lines were marvellously clear and I loved the cheeky flinging of the pizzicato figures from section to section. The succeeding Playful Pizzicato featured more commendably precise pizzicatos (slack ensemble here really undermines the music) and had an irresistable bounce.
The sarabande was perfectly paced, beautifully shaped and really rather moving, before the Frolicsome Finale (one feels that Britten was stretching somewhat for the alliteration here) brought matters to an exuberant conclusion.
If architecture is indeed "frozen music", as Goethe declared in 1829, then Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is surely molten architecture, in this case the architecture of an English cathedral. The Tallis Fantasia was one of the two works - the other being A Sea Symphony - which, both first performed in 1910, put the composer, at the ripe old age of thirty-eight, firmly on the musical map.
Although not a string player - unlike Elgar who was a more than competent violinist, Vaughan Williams had studied the organ at the Royal College of Music, where Leopold Stokowski was a fellow student - Vaughan Williams undoubtedly understood stringed instruments and his division of his forces into main orchestra, second orchestra (a double quartet plus doublebass) and solo quartet is not only thoroughly idiomatic, it also brilliantly imitates the organ's several manuals.
The music itself is both profound and affecting and Friday's account, despite one or two brief passages of less-than-perfect intonation, was magical. I must briefly mention Joanna Hood's exquisite playing of the wonderful viola solo (also in the Elgar - raising the question: was the sudden discovery of the viola by English composers all due to Lionel Tertis?).
The music unfolded as a single huge paragraph, with all the inevitability of a truly great performance.
I am pleased to be able to report that this outstanding concert was both very well attended and most enthusiastically received.
I would not have missed it for anything.
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