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Pulcinella
Cambridge
West Road Concert Hall 28 April
London Southbank
Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall 30 April
The
Guardian Four Stars ****
Erica Jeal Saturday
3 May 2008
He may be best known on this side
of the world as the impetus behind the Bach Collegium Japan, but it would
be a mistake to pigeonhole Masaaki Suzuki as a Bach specialist.
In fact, in the opening work of this eclectic programme with the Britten
Sinfonia, he even showed himself a dab hand at conducting the ensemble's
namesake composer. The 1932 Sinfonietta saw the 18-year-old Britten transforming
influences from Bridge to Stravinsky into something that was distinctively
his; here, it sounded like quite a statement of intent, with crisp string
playing of a heft that belied the ensemble's small size.
Bach's C sharp minor Prelude
and Fugue from the 48 came filtered through the ear of Stravinsky. In
his transcription, the Prelude falls to the strings, here unkindly exposing
their tuning. The fugue was more successful, shared between a quintet
of clarinets and bassoons, solemnly quirky yet with its interweaving lines
satisfyingly clear.
Next came Mozart, in which
the Suzuki dynamo powered relentlessly through the grave introduction
to the Don Giovanni overture. This led into three numbers from the opera,
where baritone Roderick Williams dashed off the title role's Champagne
Aria with urgent, suitably arrogant panache, and tenor Toby Spence threw
out a gloriously gutsy Il Mio Tesoro.
Soprano Rachel Nicholls, a
late stand-in, made a slightly nervous but glowing job of Anne Trulove's
virtuoso aria from Stravinsky's Rake's Progress. It was with Pulcinella,
Stravinsky's brilliantly skewed mirror held up to the 18th century, that
the programme's strands came together. The three soloists joined in a
trio of Mozartian poise, the orchestra revelled in seamlessly expressive
playing from leather-lunged oboist Nicholas Daniel, and Suzuki urged them
on with unflagging, unrelenting energy.
Local
Secrets
Mike Levy 29 April
2008
Sinfonia's Progress: Britten Sinfonia play to
the theme of rakishness
Cambridge's 5-star orchestra was back at West Road with a programme that
seemed more like a mini music festival than a single concert.
Here was an embarrassment of
aural riches with a central theme: rakishness - that uncomfortable combination
of devilish attraction with the scumbag morals of the rapacious male.
This is a tension that has attracted composers such as Mozart with his
opera, Don Giovanni and Stravinsky and his 1951 work, The Rake's Progress.
Both pieces were gloriously represented in yet another triumphant evening
for a band at the top of its form.
The evening opened with Benjamin
Britten's first published work, the Sinfionetta. The orchestra, under
its dynamic conductor Masaaki Suzuki, were in thrilling form with this
engaging and ever-fascinating piece. Written when the composer was only
18, the piece is a flamboyant exercise in orchestration with its endless
variations on a simple opening theme. It is a work that shows the orchestra
at its best - accomplished both in small ensemble work (there's a wonderful
moment in the second movement when the work pares down to a haunting duet
for two violins) or big-scale full-on tutti.
The Britten work was followed
by a short piece by Stravinsky, his arrangement of Bach's Prelude and
Fugue in C sharp minor. Stravinsky and neoclassicism was another theme
of this rich and diverse evening. His ingenious arrangement for the Bach
again played to the band's strength in depth especially in the dancing
fugue which is scored only for wind quintet.
Mozart followed next with a
soaring account of his Don Giovanni overture with its mighty blasts, doom-laden
menace and perky Italian chutzpah. This led straight into three well-known
arias from the opera sung with astonishing power by Toby Spence (tenor),
Roderick Williams (baritone) and Rachel Nicholls standing in for the indisposed
Carolyn Sampson. She continued this 'Night at the Opera' section with
the exciting finale to Stravinsky's Rake's Progress. Though understandably
she lost a little dramatic power by having to follow the score, Nicholls
sang with immense power and meaning. The orchestra, of course, were spot
on in accompanying her. And all this was only the first half!
In the second there was one
work, but a big one: Stravinsky's choral suite from his ballet Pulcinella.
Again our three singers were in fine voice and the orchestra thoroughly
enjoying itself with Stravinsky's immensely attractive and vigorous score
(one his early forays into a neoclassical style). The eleven movements
of this work - always unexpected, scored (like Britten's) with youthful
panache a real sense of the dramatic - held the full-house audience in
complete attention. Both orchestra and singers won almost wild applause
(by Cambridge standards) by the end of what was a great feast of wonderful
music making.
David
Nice writer/broadcaster/journalist and lecturuer on music. He
created the music blog http://davidnice.blogspot.com/
Friday 2 May 2008
Show me the corpse
Apparently one of the unspeakables on Newsnight Review, that slough of
anti-musical (and sometimes anti-everything) philistinism, said of The
Minotaur something along the lines of 'if you think classical music is
dead, go to Covent Garden and view the corpse'. Well, I can't speak for
Birtwistle until I've seen the show, which I'm due to do tomorrow, though
some reports suggest these might well be the death-throes of the 1960s
avant-garde. But I'd respond to this lofty pundit by saying 'if you think
classical music is dead, go hear the Britten Sinfonia and see a healthy
body bursting with vitality'.
This band seems to have its
finger on the pulse without resorting to any trendy gimmicks. The audience
is a bigger mix than any to be seen over at the Festival Hall concerts,
with plenty of young people and quite a few kids, and as the lights dim
and the players come on stage, they're received with all the ecstasy usually
reserved for a cult group. The BS programmes are inventive in the extreme,
though not always esoteric: you could take from Wednesday's Queen Elizabeth
Hall programme the excerpts from Don Giovanni and The Rake's Progress
as well as the more outlandish numbers from the complete Pulcinella and
insert them into one of those quasi-club evenings which have sprung up
in Berlin and are now being tried out at the RFH. One of the nice girls
who work for the Sinfonia told me that they will be participating in just
such an event this October, playing Tchaikovsky which will then be 'remixed'
by a DJ (!)
Yet this was a programme to
be taken in the round. They started with Britten's early, and apart from
its finale not terribly memorable, Sinfonietta and Stravinsky's very late
and simple arrangement of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C sharp minor. The
Fugue, scored for three clarinets and two bassoons, was an especially
phantasmagorical event in the hands of the BS's world-class wind department.
In that respect, the group is like a mini version of Abbado's super-band
Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and it boasts perhaps the finest oboist in
the world (at least I think so, because as a player I'd always aspire
to his beefy, full-blooded sound), Nicholas Daniel:
He shone so much in the Theme and Variations of Pulcinella that even friends
who didn't know him as one of our greatest oboe soloists - second only,
surely, to his teacher Maurice Bourgue - were startled by his brilliance.
But this was an evening of great solos from this army of generals. The
vocal trio included Roddy Williams, who gave the most relaxed and focused
performance of Don Giovanni's Champagne Aria I've ever heard, and Toby
Spence, again unusually virile and full-toned (and phrase- and breath-perfect)
for Don Ottavio's 'Il mio tesoro'. The soprano, Rachel Nicholls, was a
last-minute replacement for the sublime Carolyn Sampson, whom I've been
longing to hear live since listening to her Bach Cantatas on CD. Nicholls
is intensely musical, but in this company her voice seemed a shade lacking
in individuality, and the cruel top C of Anne Trulove's aria was not her
strongest asset. What a nice idea, though, that they all came back for
Pulcinella, and seemed to enjoy its purely orchestral passages so much
(how could they not?). Masaaki Suzuki was in his element here, but wanted
just a little human sympathy in his early-music view of Mozart. Still,
it was a deliriously happy evening.
I've been taking the Morley/BBCSO
students through the Vaughan Williams symphonies (4 and 6 especially).
How easy it is to overlook their unusual shape and originality of expression
- even the Pastoral Symphony, which I haven't heard in concert for many
years now, took me by surprise in its more tortured passages. Here's real
individuality, even if one sometimes tires of the over-used folksy intervals.
The
Independent Three Stars ***
Bayan Northcott, Tuesday, 6
May 2008
One sensed a certain puzzlement among the Queen Elizabeth Hall audience
after the first item in this Britten Sinfonia concert: the late Stravinsky
arrangement of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C sharp minor from Book 1 of
"The 48" sounded so radical as scarcely to resemble Bach at
all.
In fact, the order of the programme had been changed without announcement
and what had just been heard was Britten's taut little Sinfonietta Op
1 (1932); a work owing little to Bach – or to Stravinsky, pace the
assertion in a programme book riddled with errors. But then, how much
of Stravinsky was to be discerned in the Bach arrangement that duly followed?
Hospitalised in 1969, Stravinsky
evidently resorted to transcription merely to keep his hand in, and beyond
a few characteristic touches of rhythmic emphasis, his version could have
been by anyone.
These quibbles aside, this
was a hugely enjoyable concert. Any worries that Masaaki Suzuki, renowned
for the refinement of his Bach cantata recordings, might lack the punch
and drive for more modernist repertoire were already laid to rest by his
energetic direction of the Britten. The account of the Overture to Mozart's
Don Giovanni that came after the Bach/ Stravinsky was explosive.
This was by way of setting
up a link with Stravinsky's not un-Mozartean opera The Rake's Progress
(1951): three numbers from Don Giovanni, including "La ci darem la
mano" sung by Roderick Williams and "Il mio tesoro" with
a heroic Toby Spence, plus Rachel Nicholls in Anne Truelove's Act I scena
from the Rake, culminating in the ringing top C that Stravinsky added
at the insistence of his librettist W H Auden.
And so to the complete version
of Stravinsky's ballet with song Pulcinella (1920), wickedly reworking
baroque items of Pergolesi and others, in which the shuffling and balance
of different tempi over all is as important as the many detailed naughtinesses
of harmony and orchestration. Conductor, singers and players were all
fully alive to its teeming ingenuities. What composer today, one reflected
ruefully on coming out, could deliver such a feast of invention and gaiety?
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