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University Centre Auditorium
November 30, 2018
Ferenc Liszt must have been one of the most generous musicians who ever lived; even composers whose music he disliked could count on him for moral and financial support. (Even when, like Wagner, they were anything but grateful.)
Liszt was, for example, instrumental in bringing the music of Robert Schumann and the pianism of his wife, Clara, to the attention of the French musical public. When Liszt asked Clara if she had been satisfied by his lengthy article singing her praises in one of the Parisian musical papers, she replied that she was, but added: "What made you say I practised with a black cat on each side of the pianoforte desk? You know that isn't true."
To which Liszt (as ever, decades ahead of his time) responded: "My dear madam, in order to make an article like that go down with the French public it must have something piquant about it."
It might be argued that, at least to some extent, Liszt has been the victim of his own logic: many of the more outrageous canards aimed at him over the years must surely have been invented in order to add "something piquant" to a story otherwise thought insufficiently titillating.
Of course, as the late Sir Terry Pratchett once remarked, "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on" and the truth will frequently never quite catch up. As can be seen from the fact that even three decades after the publication of the first volume of Alan Walker's magisterial three-volume biography, Liszt's reputation is still largely that of a superficial, albeit pianistically stupendous, womaniser.
Read Walker, on the other hand, and you are likely to come away from it thinking that if any composer deserved the appellation "saint-like", that composer was Liszt.
Friday night's UVic Orchestra programme closed with a very fine performance, by UVic Concerto Competition winner Ya Ping Huang, of the first of Liszt's two piano concertos.
This was a performance which grew in stature as it progressed. Perhaps the orchestral introduction was a tad underpowered (or perhaps the power was simply being held in reserve) but Huang's bold entry grabbed the music by the scruff of its neck and did not let go. Technical brilliance may be the most obvious attribute of the solo part, but mere dexterity is not enough and Huang is clearly aware of this, as she elicited some delicious tone colours from the keyboard, especially in the slower second subject (however, I did feel that the tempo for this was a little detached for my liking).
Although the score dictates that the four movements are to be played without a break (and despite the fact that the programme note specifically mentions this fact) Ajtony Csaba for some reason inserted a pause before the slow movement. I am still uncertain as to why.
The movement itself featured some excellent work from the cellos and basses, as well as wonderfully characterful wind playing with filigree piano interleaved.
The third movement may not strike today's listener as particularly avant-garde, but the prominent use of the triangle was seen in some quarters as outrageous when the concerto was first performed in 1855 (Liszt was the soloist, Berlioz the conductor). The distinctly unprogressive critic Eduard Hanslick dubbed the work Liszt's "Triangle Concerto".
Here the movement came across as distinctly playful, with a vitality and delicacy which were irresistible. And whoever was playing the triangle (it was either Cashton McGillivray or Jessie Johnson) did a splendid job of making it sound fresh without dominating the sound to the point of being overbearing.
The finale positively scintillated, with excellent communication between Csaba and Huang, who clearly had technique to spare. The close was every bit as exciting as I imagine Liszt intended.
The concert opened with an excellent performance of the overture to Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride. The famous introduction was taken at a measured pace, but this, in terms of articulation, was all to the good.
The detailing of the individual lines as the music built to its first tutti was most impressive; string tone was full and rich and the winds were delightfully perky.
I don't usually attend pre-concert talks and I have a particular aversion to them when they are given mid-concert. For some reason Csaba decided that Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) needed explication over and above the programme notes. I can't say I cared for his lecture-room manner, which involved asking the audience for suggestions as to which instrument Ravel might have employed for various characters in the fairy stories on which the music is based.
But it did serve to demonstrate that somebody's knowledge of French is even feebler than mine: at least I don't think that "l'Impératice des Pagodes" means "The City of the Pagodas".
Which misconception might have explained why the movement in question struck me as being a little lacking, as I put it in my notebook, in exuberance. Or, as one of Victoria's most prominent musicians (no names, no pack drill) said to me at the interval, didn't that movement usually have "a bit more pizzazz?" I (obviously) couldn't have put it better myself.
That carping aside, this was a charming performance of one of Ravel's most attractive scores, with excellent playing from all sections and a wonderfully transparent sound to the full orchestra in the final Le jardin féerique.
"Wagner", Rossini famously remarked, "has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour". Given that Rossini uttered his bon mot in 1867, the year before he died, and given that Parsifal was not first performed until 1882, his remark cannot have been in reference to the prelude to that opera.
But it might just as well have been.
Friday's programme featured a very well played account, with sumptuous brass, but (once again to quote my notebook) "what tedious music" it is! I can only say that I were in an opera house I'd be frantically looking for the exit during the prelude: the prospect of several more hours of this level of boredom not being in any way, shape or form, an attractive one.
"Chacun", as they say (if not entirely grammatically), "à son goût".
Despite my strictures this was a most enjoyable evening and this latest incarnation of the UVic Orchestra is a very fine one.
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