Karlowicz : Eternal Songs
Szymanowski : Violin Concerto No. 1 (Nicola Benedetti)
Prokofiev : Symphony No. 5
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Andrew Litton
There are some evenings, you come out of a concert feeling emotionally steamrollered, because of the content of the programme, and the pitch of execution, and this was one of them. Tonight was a case in point, packed full of high-octane, hot-house lush music. The opening piece was the 'mystery' item, an extended, three-part symphonic poem by a Polish composer only slightly older than Szymanowski, but who died in a skiing accident at 32, without ever really getting the chance to mature musically. Not that Eternal Songs is exactly an immature composition, there are some interesting things going on, but the influence of the Austro-German fin-de-siècle style is overpowering, Richard Strauss in particular, and only the last movement struck a note that seemed, to me, to have some real individuality in it. It was given a sympathetic, full-blooded reading, but I have to admit it has sort of gone in one ear and out the other. I will probably be resorting to the BBC's iPlayer to remind myself properly of its salient features, once they deign to put tonight's concert up.
Written ten years later by a composer six years younger, the Szymanowski 1st Violin Concerto amply demonstrates exactly why Szymanowski is generally considered to have been Chopin's successor as Poland's foremost composer. Like Karlowicz, Szymanowski was to find considerable inspiration in the Tatra Mountains region of Poland, but not at this stage of his career. In 1916, he was right in the middle of his most mystical, most exotic vein, turning out some of his most hauntingly beautiful music, like the 3rd Symphony, the Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess, or Masks, before embarking on the opera King Roger, which would mark the end of this phase of his writing, and although the Karlowicz was not without interest, it could not hold a candle to the shimmering fantasy of this concerto.
This was the vehicle which made tonight's soloist, Nicola Benedetti, a household name in Britain, and it is still extraordinary the degree to which she seems to carry this music under her skin. The concerto's free-ranging, rhapsodic flight begins in the same dark forest full of strange fauna as Stravinsky's Firebird, and the violin dances in and out of its shades like some mythical, magical creature, laughing or languishing, flirting and flying, until it skitters mysteriously off into the ether, endlessly captivating and elusive. This was a wonderful reading, Benedetti's violin singing out clearly and apparently effortlessly, over a richly detailed and coloured orchestra.
There's little trace of the cataclysm that was shaking Europe when Szymanowski wrote his first concerto, whereas Prokofiev's 5th Symphony is a hymn of triumph over adversity. Unhappy in exile, he took the gamble of returning to his homeland in the mid-30s, but suffered, like many of his colleagues, from accusations of 'formalism' - which meant whatever the powers that were wanted it to mean at the time, but always trouble. The music he wrote in praise of the Soviet regime was never particularly inspired, but the music he wrote that exalted Russia and its people was a very different matter, and fortunately the apparatchiks could rarely tell the difference. There's little second-degree with Prokofiev, unlike Shostakovich, who could write apparently triumphal Soviet music with a venomous undertone that sets your teeth on edge, and if the frenetic clockwork movement of the last movement suggests intense industry, well, it was never necessary to be Communist to understand the value of hard work. (Although sometimes Prokofiev's propensity for recycling his own music makes me wonder at his own degree of industry.) At any rate, in 1944, more or less sequestered along with a bunch of colleagues away from the war, Prokofiev turned out what remains his most successful symphony, a vast, lyrical paean to the spirit, and the survival, of his own people in those troubled times.
The first two movements were excellent, vibrantly colourful, with sonorous brass and a strongly theatrical turn of phrase that reminded us that both Cinderella and War and Peace were very recently completed. However, the Adagio third movement was let down a little, mainly by a lack of quality of tone in the great arching phrase of the main theme for the violins. As the theme reached its peak, it was like a singer running out of breath at the critical moment, the sound thinning out and losing cohesion, and that proved a distraction and a bit of a disappointment. After that, the finale wasn't quite as laser-sharp as I would have liked, but the pace was crisp enough to excite, and bring the piece to a rousing conclusion.
[Next: 16th November]
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