Lutoslawski : Symphony No. 4
Szymanowski : Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin (Olga Pasichynk, soprano)
Szymanowski : Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess (Olga Pasichynk, soprano)
Lutoslawski : Concerto for Orchestra
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov
It's not clear to me why Szymanowski chose to orchestrate only parts of these two song-cycles. The original versions for voice and piano have six songs each, but when he came to make the orchestral versions, some fifteen years later, he only took three songs from Op. 42 (Muezzin), and four from Op. 31. What's particularly interesting is that by the time he made these orchestrations, in the early 30s, his musical style had travelled quite a way from the heady exoticism he favoured during the second decade of the century, and had become leaner and sharper. Without reverting completely to the lush orientalism one hears in the First Violin Concerto, or King Roger, however, these delicate, filigree orchestrations remain true to the intent of the originals, and to some degree actually make their affiliations even clearer than in the piano versions. This is particularly true of the Op. 31 songs, where the debt to Stravinsky's Le Rossignol is extremely obvious precisely because of the orchestration. The Infatuated Muezzin leans more towards Ravel and Rimsky-Korsakov in colour, with hints of Shéhérazade, and The Golden Cockerel very present.
Of the two sets tonight, Princess worked better, for two reasons. First of all, although it's not uncommon to hear Op. 42 sung by a woman, I've always felt it works better with a tenor; something about the way the melisma is shaped seems more yearning in the high male voice, rather than the high female one. Secondly, the orchestra itself lacked warmth, failing to evoke the shimmering heat of the desert. On this point too, Olga Pasichynk's voice was cool, never quite reaching that edge of fervour in which religious ecstasy is fused with erotic ecstasy, as required by the poems. For Princess, on the other hand, her fresh, bright timbre was ideal, as was the light, spiky texture of the orchestra, swathed in moonlight, dancing and elusive, as unreal as the fairy-tales the songs evoke.
These two sets of songs were framed by two works by Szymanowski's successor as the pre-eminent Polish composer, Witold Lutoslawski, one from the end of his career, the other from the middle. Lutoslawski remains an approachable figure in 20th Century music, intriguing without being overly abstruse, permitting easy access but offering more in the face of deeper analysis. I could do with hearing the 4th Symphony again, there were parts I wasn't quite fitting together in my mind, and I wasn't convinced by the playing of what I'll call the "rainfall" section, at the start of the second movement. I could be completely wrong there; maybe it was played exactly as written, but without a score I wouldn't know.
However, the symphony's overall effect was rather eclipsed by the earlier and much more brilliant Concerto for Orchestra, which closed the concert. Of course a comparison with Bartók's celebrated piece of the same title is inevitable - the Lutoslawski holds up very well, I think. It's shorter and more compact, and while the virtuoso showcasing of the orchestra is equally present, the means deployed are somewhat different. There is a passage at the start of the last movement, the Passacaglia section, where I was very strongly reminded of Britten's Passacaglia from Peter Grimes - not just the musical structure, but the orchestration, with ponderous brass and increasingly agitated strings and winds - which was a bit surprising to me, but it was soon swept away in the whirl of the Toccata which brings the piece to its exhilarating close. Again, I felt there were a couple of moments where the strings weren't quite together as they should have been, but it was fleeting, and took little away from the drive and excitement of the work.
[Next : 19th January]
No comments:
Post a Comment