Bartók : Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin
Bartók : Piano Concerto No. 2 (Olli Mustonen)
Hindemith : Trauermusik (Scott Dickinson)
Hindemith : Symphonic Metamorphoses of themes by Carl Maria von Weber
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins
If Stravinsky's Rite of Spring can be said to have a direct musical child (as opposed to purely and simply influencing all of 20th Century music), then it must be Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin. Begun in 1917, though not completed until 1926, it's about the only piece whose musical savagery can match the seminal Stravinsky score, but where Stravinsky invents a primitive world long gone, Bartók's ballet score begins with an evocation of a world that was only just beginning to take shape, a piece of science fiction in music that seems utterly appropriate for the here and now. The screaming opening bars toss you straight into the middle of the busiest thoroughfare of the largest metropolis at peak hour, a hard, cold, noisy, grimy, urban nightmare that barely existed back when Bartók wrote the piece, but which is all too familiar now. It's music that's designed to scrape the nerve-endings raw, bold and visceral, full of brutal contrasts, sharp and uncomfortable and gripping, and Brabbins's approach was just a little too soft-grained to really pull it off.
The Second Piano Concerto was snappier, though the mood is considerably lighter. Of the three concertos, it's the least accessible, the pianist plunged headlong into a virtuoso display that hardly lets up for a second. Even the slow movement has a breathless Presto central section, skittish and uneasy, and it's not until the last movement that you get something concrete, a real sense of structure, to which to hold, with the stamping dance-like rondo whose sections are always concluded with references back to the opening fanfares of the first movement. Olli Mustonen was the light-fingered soloist, all but dancing at the keyboard, sometimes a little drowned out in the first movement by the orchestra, but the balance improved noticeably, and the slow duet with the timpani in the second movement was compelling.
Hindemith's Trauermusik was hastily composed in the space of a few hours for performance that night on the day following the announcement of the death of King George V, in 1936. He had been scheduled to perform his own Viola Concerto, but that was judged unsuitable in the light of the announcement, and the conductor persuaded him to write something new. The result was this short, austere piece for viola and strings. Hindemith was unlikely to have been very deeply affected by the news, and the piece is not so much mournful as grave and serene, an elegiac tribute more than an expression of loss, and expressively rendered by the orchestra and its principal Viola, Scott Dickinson.
I was introduced to Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses in school; it was one of the set pieces the year I sat my Higher Music, and like many another listener, I immediately succumbed to the appeal of what tonight's programme notes described as a "baton-twirling showstopper". It's an ebullient, dazzling showcase for the whole orchestra, quirky, witty and effervescent. For most of the piece, Brabbins's sedate yet sure manner worked very well; it's rhythmically complex, and he never let the orchestra slip at any point. The Turandot Scherzo, with its sly, slinky fugue, was particularly effective. Yet at the end, as with the Mandarin earlier, it was just a bit tame, the last movement not quite hitting the peak of whooping excitement that it should have.
[Next : 17th January]
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