Music in concert, in recital, in opera
I. Rachmaninov’s “Symphonic Dances”, twice over.
Changing your mind can be a great pleasure. On Sunday February 1, at the Royal Festival Hall, the conductor Santtu-Mathias Rouvali conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra in Rachmaninov’s “Symphonic Dances”, the only work composed by Rachmaninov entirely in America, at the end of his life. The next Sunday, Elim Chan conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the same score at the Barbican. Both orchestras played handsomely. I attended both with the same friend. After the former, we left the hall agreeing, condescendingly, that Rachmaninov is the best of the second tier of composers. After only one movement of the latter, we found that we were enjoying the same score much more; the following two movements confirmed our admiration for what we now found a marvellous score.
What had made the difference? Hard to pin down, but surely Chan showed the more irresistible feeling for shaping Rachmaninov’s melodies and dance sweep. (On February 18-20, Rouvali leads the New York Philharmonic in the same score. I wish him well.)
II. Concerts of Eastern European music.
To some large degree, the history of music is told in terms of geography and politics. Concert programming often still follows suit. London’s orchestral concerts in 2026 have already had several concerts of Russian and Russian-diaspora concerts: accompanying essays could have been written about which Russian composers came West when and why. Last week, Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra presented a pair of concerts of twentieth-century Eastern European music: music written by Polish, Hungarian, and Czech composers. Much of Austria is further east than the former Czechoslovakia, but Austria was west of the Iron Curtain, whereas the former Czechoslovakia was part of the Eastern bloc of Soviet-affected countries. (I wish someone would programme concerts of music from the former Habsburg Empire.)
Each concert contained works by a woman. Polish composer Grażyna Baciewicz’s 1943 “Overture” (Wednesday 4) was sophisticated but brief. The Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová was much more short-lived (1915-1940) but produced a large corpus of work that was already winning international acclaim before her death (in France, probably of typhoid fever) and has gone on doing so in recent years. Jakub Hrůśa is among the conductors who have programmed her work; Gardner on Saturday 7 spoke with particular enthusiasm of her before leading two of her works - the “Rustic Suite” and the orchestral song “Waving Farewell”. Impossible not to wish Kaprálová had gone on to write operas: in “Waving Farewell”, she gave the soprano voice compelling authority and spacious, grand lyricism.
I wish I could give more space and time to both programmes. The Polish composers Karol Szymanowski and Witold Lutoslawski made impressions of especial originality - with Szymanowski’s Polish-language “Stabat Mater” (1925-1926) and Lutoslawski’s fourth symphony (1992). But Bartók “The Wooden Prince” (1914-1917), Janáček’s “Taras Bulba” (1918-1922), and Martinů’s second violin concerto (1943) are all wonderful works. The LPO projected lines from the “Wooden Prince” scenario during the performance: while this convinced me both that Bartók had chosen a fascinating but unstageable story and that he had not always made it more intelligible. This is nonetheless a beautiful score; I hope one day to see some choreographer address it satisfyingly.
Yet Bartók’s “Dance Suite” (1923), as played by the London Symphony on Sunday
8, confirmed my feeling that Bartók, even while drawing rich inspiration from folk sources, is problematic when it comes to dance: his sense of impetus and rhythm does not inspire physical participation. Again, I hope some choreographer one day changes my mind: Bartók is a great composer, even if not great for lyrical movement.
The London Philharmonic is playing with beautiful colour and bite for Gardner. Although the “Stabat Mater” bass, Kostas Smoriginas (Lithuanian), lacked oomph, his two women colleagues, soprano Juliana Grigoryan (Armenian) and mezzosoprano Agnieszka Rehlis (Polish) were remarkable in their focused gorgeousness of tone and vehemence of utterance. Grigoryan (who has just been singing Liù in the Royal Opera’s “Turandot”) also sang the Kaprálová “Waving Farewell”: hers could prove to be one of the great voices of today - it already has mature glamour (as does she in person).
III. Sandrine Piau.
At the Wigmore Hall on Monday 9, the French soprano Sandrine Piau sang songs by Schubert, Clara Schumann, Poulenc, Wolf, Lili Boulanger, Ravel, Jeanne Bernard. Can an artist be distinguished without being distinctive? I find Piau’s singing both pleasing and pure, with fine line and occasional touches of depth and darkness, but I’m unsure I could tell the difference between her singing and that of a few other sopranos. Her diction in two languages is always correct, but seldom had the projection that would enable you to take dictation. I make the same cavil about a number of singers, but it’s particularly sad that no French singer today plants words on the ear as those of earlier generations once did.
David Kadouch was a more impressive pianist than accompanist. The piano-voice balance too often threatened to lose Piau’s clear but not large voice.
IV. The Coney Island “Così”.
The current English National Opera production of Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” (in repertory to February 21) was new in 2014. Director Phelim McDermott and set designer Tom Pye have placed the action in New York’s Coney Island - which may have been aimed at American audiences, since this was a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera - though the Met only staged it in 2018, when I first saw it and when it seemed trivial.
Curiously, it works better now, across an ocean from Coney Island - helped in good measure by Jeremy Sams’s lively translation. It’s fair to have hoped for something more disconcertingly insightful from McDermott, whom I remember as an uncannily brilliant stage actor back in 1990 (in Corneille’s “The Illusion”) and as a naughtily inventive stage director back in 1996 (with Gogol’s “The Government Inspector”). But I enjoy the way this production is played for speed and comedy - and common sense, with both women eventually hooking back up with her original lover, lesson learnt.
The whole show, conducted by Dinis Souza, has terrific energy. Both heroines exaggerate their grief in separation from Messrs Right with delicious touches of melodrama. Lucy Crowe is an outstanding Fiordiligi - open-hearted and vulnerable. The two male lovers are splendidly played and sung by Joshua Blue (Ferrando) and Darwin Prakash (Guglielmo). Ailish Tynan’s Despina, an older woman with lessons aplenty for her young female employers, is both tough and bright. “Così” ought always to be a problem drama - it’s about the emotional manipulation of women by men - but if you play it fast and not too seriously - as they do here, and as I suspect Mozart wanted all along - it’s delicious and blissfully human.
V. A composer conducts a quadruple bill.
On Wednesday 11, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the composer George Benjamin conducted a beautifully varied quadruple bill at the Festival Hall that spanned from the early twentieth century (Scriabin’s “Poem of Ecstasy”) to the early twenty-first (Benjamin’s own two “Palimpsests). Though this sounds deranged in both chronological and ornithological terms, “Poem of Ecstasy” sounds like the Firebird after hefty injections of the “Tristan” love potion: intoxicating. Benjamin’s “Palimpsests” has so different a soundworld - extremes of rhythm, harmony, and percussive sound - that you certainly know you’ve jumped a century: Romanticism is left far behind. Stravinsky’s Symphonies for Wind Instruments is an amazing nine-minute study of wind sound, sometimes sounding like a “Rite of Spring” purée.
The concert ended with Ravel’s delectable “Ma Mère l’Oye”, a work Ravel had composed for piano duet but in 1911 adapted - as a ballet - for orchestra. For this work alone, Benjamin’s conducting felt slightly on the flaccid side: Ravel’s magical score, a marvel of colourful delicacy, should be crisper. Still, this was an excellent programme, not least as a sampler of orchestral colours. Ravel learnt from Stravinsky; Stravinsky learnt from Scriabin; and Benjamin, composing after their deaths, has learnt from all three.
@Alastair Macaulay