BBCSSO, 21/04/2016

Ives : The Unanswered Question
Brett Dean : Dramatis Personae (Håkan Hardenberger, trumpet)
Rachmaninoff : Symphonic Dances

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Michael Francis

At the start of tonight's concert, the conductor came on stage to take his bow, then promptly abandoned the podium to go and stand in the centre of the orchestra.  It was an appropriately off-beat start to a concert full of beautiful, but unsettling music, starting with Ives's The Unanswered Question.  Michael Francis's stance was no doubt to better be seen by the three separate groups of players Ives requires for his piece - the solo trumpet, somewhere towards the rear of the hall, the woodwind quartet standing at the front of the choir gallery, and the strings in their usual positions.  It's a hauntingly lovely piece, almost painfully brief, especially when given the kind of quiet focus of this performance, and was an excellent choice to begin the concert.

Dramatis Personae, by the Australian composer Brett Dean, is a trumpet concerto commissioned by tonight's soloist, Håkan Hardenberger, and created in 2013.  Dean elaborates on the basic concept of the concerto soloist as a dramatic protagonist, familiar from the big 19th Century concertos, but undermines it by having the soloist "lose" the battle in the first movement, his brittle, brilliant, conflictual material being swamped by the orchestra finally.  In the second, the soloist goes through a reflective phase, as if pondering the significance of that state of affairs, and in the third, he becomes more of a collaborative partner than an opponent, to the extent of joining the brass players in the ranks of the orchestra towards the end of the concerto.

Dean, present in the hall tonight, said this last movement (subtitled "The Accidental Revolutionary") was in part inspired by "Modern Times", when the hapless Chaplin, in the wrong place at the wrong time, as was his wont, and getting caught up in a protest march, picks up a piece of red cloth and promptly gets arrested as a communist sympathiser.  When Hardenberger rejoined his colleagues in the orchestra, the music - or at least, the trumpets' music - turns to a jaunty march, very bandstand-style, that the rest of the orchestra seems to want to drown out, and I was left wondering if it really was a participatory gesture, or one of abandonment of principles.  Dean's music is not difficult to listen to, as contemporary music goes, and there's certainly food for thought there.

And so to Rachmaninoff's magnificent final composition, the Symphonic Dances, the ultimate, and most complete expression of everything Rachmaninoff ever was as a composer, in a darkly lustrous canvas permeated with nostalgia and saturated with the ever-present shadow of Death.  If the song of the alto sax in the first movement lacked lyrical flow - and it should never be forgotten that Rachmaninoff penned some of the finest art songs in the Russian canon - the strings more than made up for it when they took up the theme, with a big, luscious sweep of sound.  The second movement got that unholy union of La Valse and the Valse triste, Death looking for the evanescent ghost of the latter amidst the apocalyptic ashes of the former, just right, while the triumphant conclusion of the last movement still retained the ominous overtones of the rest of the piece.  Brass and winds, though good, did not always have quite the sonorities I look for here, but the strings had just the right richness of timbre, and the passionate ebb and flow in the phrasing to carry the work through.

[Next : 5th May]