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Royal Theatre
November 21, 2015
It is sometimes said that the best Spanish music was all written by French composers.
For me, Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole is an exception that proves the rule. There is, with a couple of brief moments, nothing that sounds particularly Spanish about the work; add to that the fact that - once again, in my opinion - the work suffers from undistinguished melodic material and the result is one of those pieces which, if I encountered it on my car radio, would probably cause me to change stations.
Having said all of which, if I am going to hear the Symphonie Espagnole, then let me hear it played by the great James Ehnes, almost certainly the finest violinist this country has ever produced.
From his first, swaggering entry, Ehnes was clearly totally in command of his instrument and the music. He is evidently one of those rare musicians whose technique is both flawless and yet totally at the service of the music, never on display merely for its own sake. Ehnes' fingerwork was dazzling, his tonal palette extensive and his intonation immaculate.
Tania Miller and the Victoria Symphony accompanied him superbly; the orchestra sounded glorious and Miller's careful attention to Ehnes' subtle (and, at times, not-so-subtle) rubato paid dividends.
A first-class performance of, to my ears, a second-rate work.
For his encore, Ehnes played the last movement, marked "presto", of Bach's first solo violin sonata.
For the three-and-a-half minutes this took him to play, time stood still. If there is a heaven, at least some of its soundtrack will surely be Ehnes playing Bach. Elysian.
"Wagner", Rossini once famously remarked, "has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour".
It would be tempting, albeit something of an exaggeration, and perhaps rather unfair, to describe Tania Miller's reading of Mahler's Symphony No.5 similarly. Nevertheless the stricture contains more than a grain of truth, for this performance was, indeed, the proverbial curate's egg.
Mahler's Fifth is a transitional work: after the "Wunderhorn" symphonies - numbers two, three and four, with their texts taken from von Armin and Brentano's "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" - five is the beginning of an instrumental trilogy at whose heart is the sixth symphony, Mahler's "dark night of the soul". The fifth has its dark side, but is ultimately a long journey from the dark into the light; structurally, though, it reveals a composer still experimenting with form - it is in five movements, but three parts, the first two movements comprising part one, the lengthy scherzo part two, and the closing two movements part three.
A successful performance of the fifth, therefore, requires a firm hand on the tiller and a careful balancing of tempos in order to convey the somewhat diffuse structure.
Tania Miller directed a performance which often sounded wonderful, yet which, in its sometimes strange choice of tempos, and certain other regards, simply did not satisfy as a whole.
The symphony began well, with the famous trumpet call splendidly played by Ryan Cole, yet the tempo was arguably too slow and the music tended to drag, although the arrival of the second section improved matters in this regard.
The second movement proceeded at a more suitable tempo with some splendidly vehement brass and deliciously lyrical cellos. It, again, was rather episodic and the great "chorale", which returns at the close of the symphony, struck me as a little underdone.
The third movement is almost a concertante movement for the first horn. Many conductors in recent years have taken to having the principal horn come to the front of the stage for this movement. Given the packed nature of the stage at the Royal it is entirely understandable that Miller did not do this, instead Alana Despins, although at the back of the orchestra, stood to play her part and played it with panâche and aplomb.
The fourth movement adagietto is probably Mahler's best-known music. It has been used, notably by Visconti in "Death in Venice", as movie soundtrack music; it has also been used by over twenty choreographers as the basis of ballets.
Yet, the tendency over the course of the twentieth century was to play the music ever more slowly. Willem Mengelberg wrote in his own score: "This Adagietto was Gustav Mahler's declaration of love for Alma! Instead of a letter, he sent her this in manuscript form; no other words accompanied it. She understood and wrote to him: He should come!!! (both of them told me this!)". Mengelberg's recording of this movement alone, the first to be made, in 1926, lasts just over seven minutes; Bruno Walter's from 1938, a hair under eight (even less in his 1947 complete recording). Both conductors had, of course, worked with Mahler and knew him well. Yet within a few decades, some conductors were regularly taking almost a quarter-of-an-hour (sometimes more) over this "love song". As Donald Mitchell has pointed out, "the successful interpretation of the Adagietto will be that which sustains the long melody as if it were written for the voice. No singer could possibly sustain the very slow tempos some conductors have adopted".
It was with all this in mind that I did something I rarely do: I timed the performance of this movement. By my watch, and bearing in mind that, in the rather subdued lighting I might have misread it, Miller seemed to take somewhere between eleven and twelve minutes. Which might seem to be steering a middle course, but which actually did sound too slow. (By, in comparison with Mengelberg and Walter, almost exactly half.)
The orchestra strings and harpist Annabelle Stanley provided a sumptuous sound, but the music did not flow.
One of the more inexplicable tendencies exhibited by Miller in this performance was her inconsistency with regard to the score. In several places where indicated she, very commendably, had the horns play with their bells up (when Sir John Barbirolli did this in the 1950s, he was accused of "grandstanding", times have indeed changed). And yet, where the score clearly indicates that the finale should follow the adagietto "attacca" - i.e. immediately - we had a distinct pause, something I don't believe I have ever heard before.
After an introduction which was, like the previous movement, too slow, the main fugal music picked up the tempo and the various contrapuntal lines were extremely well delineated. The arrival of the big chorale was very fine, Miller's steady tempo for the movement allowed her to slightly speed up here, which is a very exciting effect, but then almost immediately we had a massive broadening of the tempo (like, it must be admitted, so many conductors), thus vitiating the momentum . The final bars packed their usual punch, but ultimately the performance left me frustrated.
A decidedly mixed evening.
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