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University Centre Auditorium
March 17, 2019
Joseph Haydn must have been one of the most modest geniuses who ever lived. Moreover, he combined that modesty with a wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humour: the story of his exchange with King George III — "Dr. Haydn, you have written a good deal." "Yes, Sire, a great deal more than is good" — is well known; but there are other, less-known anecdotes, which are perhaps even more enlightening.
For instance, one night, as a young man, Haydn and his friend Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf entered a beer hall in which several musicians were playing, not very well, a minuet by Haydn himself.
Haydn casually asked the leader of the group "whose minuet?" to which came the response "Haydn's".
Haydn, feigning anger, declared "that's a stinking minuet!" "Says who?" riposted the violinist, jumping out of his seat in his anger. His fellow musicians joined in and were poised "to smash their instruments over Haydn's head" when Dittersdorf, a large man, grabbed Haydn and pulled him out of the door to safety.
Even at his most ironic, I doubt that Haydn would ever have described his Symphony No.96, commonly known as the "Miracle" and probably, according to H.C. Robbins Landon the first of the "London" symphonies actually to be performed (on 1 March 1791), as a "stinking symphony": in his own advertisements in The Times, he customarily referred to them as "Grand" (albeit as "Grand Overtures", as the terminology had yet to stabilise).
While No.96 has never been and never will be my favourite of the dozen "London" symphonies, that is rather like saying that Mt Annapurna I is not as high as Mt Everest: true, but scarcely germane.
It was with a splendidly lively and superlatively played account of the "Miracle", that Christian Kluxen and the Victoria Symphony closed their excellent programme on Sunday afternoon.
Not that the performance was perfect: after a relatively restrained slow introduction, the opening movement was taken at a very brisk pace indeed — and while there is nothing inherently wrong with that, I did feel that it was a little hard driven and perhaps lacking in subtlety.
However, the slow movement was charming after the preceding drama and the delicate close was exquisitely done.
Although the minuet, in common with many "HIP" performances, was again taken at a fair clip, it nevertheless possessed the one attribute essential to such movements: it danced. The trio was almost plaintive — thanks, in large part, to Michael Byrne's oboe.
The finale was a triumph: nimble and, to my ears at least, with that extra touch of the subtle that the first movement lacked.
Regular readers of these pages (there must be one or two of you) will know that I am perhaps more exacting in my judgments of performances of Haydn than those of any other composer. My minor carping should, therefore, be understood strictly in this context and not be permitted to undermine the fact that this was, by any standards, a very fine performance indeed.
Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa was one of the first works he produced after a self-imposed period of "artistic reorientation" lasting some eight years, during which he abandoned his adherence to Schoenberg's twelve-tone method and studied plainsong, Gregorian chant and music of the Renaissance.
His resulting new style he dubbed "tintinnabuli" and it was recordings of some of the earliest works in this style that propelled him to his position as the first, and still most popular, of the so-called "holy minimalists".
Pärt's music has an appealing simplicity, sounding simultaneously both ancient and yet undeniably modern.
As Sunday's performance amply demonstrated, this is music in which to immerse oneself, not necessarily music to listen to in the usual sense. And, despite the undoubted nod to antiquity, the spirit of John Cage nevertheless hovers over the piece in the shape of the prepared piano.
Perhaps more obviously than in other concertante works, the soloists in Tabula Rasa need to be on top form as far as intonation and precision are concerned: Pärt's music does not lend itself to the kind of emotional swagger that can, in other composers, enable one to overlook technical shortcomings.
I am happy to report that Christi Meyers and Tori Gould, both members of the Victoria Symphony, were immaculate in this regard and it is difficult to imagine the music better played, even when (as occurs quite often) the solo parts soared into the stratosphere.
The final chord of Ludus, the opening movement, is some twenty-one bars of a single chord, "free bowed" (i.e. bowed independently) by the musicians. This has the effect (as Leopold Stokowski, who always insisted his strings not bow in the usual synchronised fashion, understood very well) of giving a rich, lush, seamless sound which was here most impressive.
The second movement, Silentium begins pianissimo, which is never easy, but Kluxen and the orchestra made it seem so, playing the music with total concentration. At the close we are left with only solo viola, cello and bass playing a descending scale. which the viola and cello complete, dropping out leaving only Mary Rannie's commendably secure bass, before the final bars of silence (which are written into the score, which is why Kluxen kept beating time even after the musicians stopped playing — just in case you were wondering).
After the work's premiere in 1977, Pärt's fellow Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür said "I was carried beyond. I had the feeling that eternity was touching me through this music...nobody wanted to start clapping."
Which is not at all a bad description of Sunday's excellent performance.
Carl Phillipp Emanuel was the third son of the great J.S. Bach. Born in 1714, he was arguably more famous during his lifetime than his father had been in his. Although he had previously composed a number of string symphonies, it was not until 1755 that he composed his first symphonies for full orchestra, or, as he dubbed them Orchester-Sinfonien mit zwölf obligaten Stimmen ("Orchestral symphonies with twelve obligatory voices"). These he considered his best works in the genre.
The Symphony in D, Wq176, has remained in the repertoire ever since its first performances, which makes it the earliest symphony to establish such a foothold.
I particularly enjoyed the antiphonal effects between first and second violins (which were situated to the left and right of the orchestra respectively) in the opening movement, which seemed to have a slight flavour of Sturm und Drang, although that literary movement's first musical appearance is usually considered to have been in 1761 (in the finale of Gluck's ballet Don Juan).
The transition into the second movement was smoothly achieved and the triple-time presto finale bounced along with impish dynamics, although I must say that while the abrupt slowing of the music was amusing the first and even second time it occurred, the novelty had worn off by the third (not to mention the fourth) iteration.
Which is hardly the fault of either Kluxen or the orchestra, rather a misjudgment (and, it must be noted, the only one in the entire work) by Bach himself.
The afternoon provided us with a sort of overview of musical developments in the eighteenth century, closing, as it did with Haydn's great symphony from 1791 and opening with Les Élémens, Jean-Féry Rebel's 1737 ballet, which he also called a "Symphonie Nouvelle", taking in the CPE Bach symphony along the way. (Quite what part the Pärt — no pun intended — played in this, I am uncertain, but the programming definitely worked in practice.)
Which meant that the afternoon actually began with the most discordant music of all: as Rebel himself put it: "The introduction to this Symphony is Chaos itself; that confusion which reigned among the Elements before the moment when, subject to immutable laws, they assumed their prescribed places within the natural order. This initial idea led me somewhat further. I have dared to link the idea of the confusion of the Elements with that of confusion in Harmony. I have risked opening with all the notes sounding together, or rather, all the notes in an octave played as a single sound".
And a marvellously bracing sound it produced. All the more impressive in that it has been described as the "first tone cluster" ever written — and by a seventy-one year old at that.
Some of the succeeding movement were linked, so that it was not always easy to tell exactly where one was in the piece. However, this did not affect my enjoyment of the music, which was inventive and tuneful. It incorporated a number of dance styles, of which I especially enjoyed the two Tambourins (and I do love a good tambourin).
It was also, if this still needs saying, extremely well played.
All-in-all, a most rewarding afternoon's music-making.
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