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University Centre Auditorium
November 12, 2017
Hyperbole may be catching.
Alban Berg memorably, in a letter to Anton Webern, described Gustav Mahler's A minor symphony as "the only Sixth, despite the Pastoral".
I am tempted, therefore, to describe Ralph Vaughan Williams' Symphony No.3 as "the only Pastoral, despite the Beethoven".
But I shall endeavour to resist the temptation, despite the outstanding quality of the performance which closed Sunday's season-opener from Yariv Aloni and the Greater Victoria Youth Orchestra.
Aloni took the opening movement at a flowing tempo, his players responding superbly and allowing Vaughan Williams' marvellously subtle orchestration — which somehow never quite comes across on record — to be truly appreciated. Aloni's grasp of the long line was also a considerable factor in the success of the performance as a whole.
The uneasy tranquility of the slow movement (not that any of the four are actually fast) was beautifully captured and Tark Kim's offstage trumpet cadenza, the most obvious connexion to the First World War and a direct reference to the military bugler whose practising helped inspire the work, well-nigh immaculate.
The lumbering dance that is the heart of the scherzo featured some commendably weighty strings and brass and a marvellously full sound at the climaxes.
Perhaps part of the reason for the fact that this is one of Vaughan Williams' least performed symphonies is the expense of having a soprano soloist appear for just a few bars in the final movement.
True, she does not have that much music, but what there is needs to be sung (wordlessly) extremely well, which is precisely what Jessica Wagner did, walking onto the stage as the third movement ended for her first passage, extremely evocative over an extended timpani roll.
The strings picked up exquisitely and the movement exhibited more first-class playing all around, before finally expiring with Wagner's soprano, now high offstage and (at least to me) invisible, bringing the symphony to its deeply moving conclusion.
I was reminded, during this performance, of my visit a decade or so ago to Cliveden House by the side of the Thames in Buckinghamshire. Here there is a hospital built originally by the Canadian Red Cross in 1914 (after that war it was dismantled, but rebuilt in 1939 for the next, before eventually becoming a maternity hospital, where my brother was born). Here there is also the Cliveden War Cemetery, overlooking the Thames. The experience of seeing the graves of teenage soldiers from Manitoba and Saskatchewan who travelled thousands of miles merely to die in the mud of Flanders was almost unbearably poignant.
As, indeed, in places, was Sunday's performance.
In February 1893 the first performance of Jean Sibelius's tone-poem En Saga was given in Helsinki by what was then known as the Helsinki Orchestral Society, the first permanent orchestra in any Nordic country, which had been founded just a decade previously. (In 1914 it merged with the Helsinki Symphony Orchestra to become the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.)
During rehearsals the musicians of the orchestra found the work incomprehensible and some wanted the orchestra to refuse it altogether, an attitude which, to the orchestra's founder — and chief conductor for fifty years — Robert Kajanus, was simply unacceptable. (Kajanus would famously direct the first recordings of Sibelius' first, second, third and fifth symphonies in London in the early 1930s.)
The premiere went ahead, but some critics felt the music "capricious" and in need of trimming. Ten years later Sibelius did indeed revise the work, reducing its length by about twenty per cent. It is this revised version which is almost invariably played today.
In the Swedish language, which was still dominant in Finland in the late 19th century, "En Saga" means "A Story", and the work has a clearly narrative drive, yet Sibelius never revealed what the programme, if there was one, actually was; although even three decades later he still associated the music with his native land, remarking in an interview "How could one think of anything other than Finland while listening to it!"
While the story of En Saga must remain a mystery, there is no doubt that it is broodingly atmospheric and redolent of Norse Sagas; and although it is not mature Sibelius, his compositional fingerprints are already becoming clear, especially in the relentless string ostinatos which inform much of the quicker music.
If one felt the need to criticise the performance, one could remark that the string arpeggios at the very beginning were not really soft enough.
But that is an almost trivial detail set beside the performance's many outstanding qualities: excellent playing from all sections — and full marks to the violas; exceptionally well controlled crescendos to the work's big climaxes and that feeling that the music was unfolding as a single huge paragraph.
Rossini's La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) was written quickly; legend even has it that the producer locked the composer in a room until he had completed the overture, which he threw, one sheet at a time, out of the window for the copyists.
The opera itself concerns a servant girl, Ninetta, who is sentenced to death for stealing a silver spoon, which is eventually (in, of course, the nick of time) discovered to have been purloined by the eponymous magpie. (An early version contained a Perry Mason-style courtroom scene, later dropped, in which the magpie, confronted with the evidence of his crime, breaks down under intense cross-examination on the witness stand and confesses all. No, not really.)
The overture begins with a dramatic roll on the snare drum, which was intended to grab the audience's attention. Aloni ensured this by directing the percussionist to begin playing as he stepped on to the podium to direct the performance.
A crisp opening led to a nicely-paced and very well-shaped allegro which had a real spring to its step. Dynamics and tempos were exceptionally well contoured and Aloni triumphantly managed to avoid that typical pitfall in performances of Rossini overtures: premature acceleration. (I used that pun in my first ever review in Victoria, back in April of 1992, so it is about due for another outing.)
It is so easy to take Rossini for granted, but this was a performance to make the listener realise just how much there is in the music.
Throughout the afternoon the young musicians — and, as usual, there was a significant percentage of brand-new members — played extremely well indeed.
Clearly the latest iteration of the GVYO is keeping up the very high standards established by their predecessors.
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