SCO, 25/11/2011

Beethoven : Coriolan Overture
Beethoven : Piano Concerto No. 2 (Nicholas Angelich)
Mozart : Symphony No. 41 "Jupiter"

Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Leon Fleischer

I think I learnt something about presence, and how the better conductors function tonight.  To summarise very briefly (but I'll elaborate later), the Coriolan Overture was dull, the concerto was excellent, the Mozart was decent but not much more.  Yet the orchestra actually played well enough, and they appeared to enjoy their conductor.  So what went wrong for me?  It was a matter of communication, and the conductor being a conduit for the music towards the audience, as much as the orchestra itself is.

That Leon Fleischer is one of the greatest pianists of the 20th Century, I'm not disputing in the least.  I wasn't aware he conducted, though under the circumstances (the loss of mobility of the right hand for over three decades), I shouldn't have been surprised.  I did know that he was a very important, and very highly-regarded educator, and I think that that is something the orchestra probably felt while working with him.  However, he came on stage, sat down (not a criticism - he wasn't the first I've seen require to sit, and won't be the last, I'm sure), and then focused completely forward, at the players, rather than outwards, towards us, the audience.

Silence in music is never just silence.  It's a cliché, but pauses are usually meant to be pregnant with some sort of emotion - anticipation at the very least, excitement, trepidation, joy, fear... whatever is required by the work.  In Beethoven in particular, the silences are absolutely crucial.  In the best of cases, when you get that particular type of silence, it's as if you can hear the universe breathe.  The Coriolan Overture isn't quite that profound a piece, but you have those silences right from the start; they're meant to be ominous and foreboding, and they just fell flat, like a joke whose punch-line hasn't been properly delivered.

Last night I was at a John Barrowman concert.  Apples and pears, I know. However, there was one incident that now strikes me as quite pertinent to tonight's experience.  Towards the end, he delivered a version of the Abba song "The Winner Takes It All", and in the arrangement, the verse was designed to slow right down, into clearly divided phrases, with a noticeable pause between the lines, before the last reprise of the chorus.  And in the very first of these pauses, someone's mobile went off.  Now, Barrowman is a performer of considerable energy and charisma; he was not happy, but he held that silence effortlessly until the ripple of reaction from the audience was past, and continued without hesitation or any indication that there had actually been a disturbance, and the flow of the song was, to all intents and purposes, unbroken.

There's a passage towards the end of the slow movement of the Beethoven 2nd Concerto where the music similarly seems to come to a halt before its time.  With Angelich at the piano, the silence was profound, thoughtful, and not a moment too short or too long.  Here was the sensation of something organic and natural that had been lacking in the Coriolan Overture.  When it came to the Mozart, however, although the orchestral colour was much brighter and fresher, the silences, the whole respiratory apparatus of the piece once again fell flat.  It's a question of communication, that unspoken, unexpressed link between performer and audience on which so much relies, and is so hard to quantify.  Based on the evidence tonight, as a conductor, Fleischer does not have that link.

As if to prove the point, as an encore at the end of the first half, Angelich and Fleischer joined forces at the piano for one of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, a limpid miracle of grace and charm, nostalgia and humour blending in perfect - and perfectly timed - balance.

[And now for something completely different....  Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to Brum we go....]