United Kingdom Bacewicz, Mozart, Szymanowski: Johan Dalene (violin), Timothy Ridout (viola), Nicky Spence (tenor), BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo (conductor). Barbican Hall, London, 10.2.2023. (CS)
Grażyna Bacewicz – Symphony No.4
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat main K364
Karol Szymanowski – Symphony No.3 Op.24, ‘The Song of the Night’
‘Poles apart’ started the net blurb for this BBCSO live performance underneath their Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo on the Barbican, and the programme did appear to supply a somewhat unusual pairing of symphonies by two twentieth-century Polish composers, Grażyna Bacewicz and Karol Szymanowski, framing Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante. Both strands have been interesting – particularly because the concerto featured two ‘rising stars’ and former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists, violist Timothy Ridout and violinist Johan Dalene – however the elegant Classical composure of Mozart’s double concerto appeared an odd bedfellow for ravishing Polish radiance.
Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-69), was one of many few feminine composers in Poland within the post-war years to realize a stature comparable with that of Witold Lutoslawski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Mikolaj Górecki. Until the mid-Nineteen Fifties, Bacewicz led a really intensive live performance life as solo violinist and orchestral chief alongside her composing actions, but she nonetheless discovered time to write down 4 symphonies in the course of the years 1945-53. Subsequently, she eschewed the label ‘symphony’ for her giant, cyclic orchestral works, and the Fourth Symphony does really feel somewhat ‘of its time’ – phrases corresponding to ‘socialist realism’ and ‘neo-Romanticism’ rear their heads in a few of the music criticism – portray its color in large strokes, typically mechanistic, typically ebullient, typically mysterious. It was premiered on 15th January 1954 in Kraków, by the Orchestra of the Kraków Philharmonic, carried out by Bohdan Wodiczko. The affect of Szymanowski is obvious, within the folk-derived qualities of the music and within the reaching for brand spanking new sonorities, but additionally that of Béla Bartók, too – notably the latter’s Concerto for Orchestra.
Interestingly, Bacewicz wrote to her brother Vytautas, additionally a composer, in February 1952: ‘Music is a fine art, but what was written then was ugly. […] Simplification of my musical language seemed most important to me. Simplification, but not going back; not a return to classicism in the sense of the major[1]minor system, but finding something new and simple in its place, naturally – without rejecting the achievements of the part period, by which I mean the first half of the 20th century. Besides, composers were ashamed of their emotions. I have decided to reject this shame, and I am now writing emotional music.’
Sakari Oramo definitely made this music ‘emotional’. The coloristic results, the kinetic drive, the freely evolving constructions, the rhythmic creativity have been all exploited by Oramo, who carried out with evident conviction and fervour, and the music wore its emotions on its sleeve. Often the shape felt natural, evolving intuitively, with climactic statements alternating with soloist passages – within the first motion Appassionato – Allegro inquisito there was some pretty taking part in from the primary bassoon, above timpani rolls and meandering celli and basses, and from the bass clarinet. In the Adagio the harmonic language and orchestral colors took on a extra tragic tint, the atmosphere withdrawn, the ending ambiguous. But, the incisiveness of Oramo’s gestures made the wit of the Scherzo compelling and the ultimate Adagio mesto – Allegro furioso did what it says on the tin: there was a way of carving large areas of sound allied with fluid invention and orchestral panache.
At the opposite finish of the programme we had the sensuous musical-inebriation of Szymanowski’s Song of the Night, composed throughout 1914-16 however not carried out within the kind that the composer meant till February 1928, in Lviv, carried out by Adam Sottys. Oramo’s fluid gestures have been relaxed however well-defined, and he conjured a rapturous sound-world above which tenor Nicky Spence might float, soar and roar.
The composer described the vocal materials for the solo tenor (within the first and third part of the three-part, through-composed symphony) as being ‘more melodic than declamatory, and require[ing] quite a big and graceful, lyrically coloured voice’. Well, Spence definitely has that, and he brilliantly conveyed the intoxication and elation of the textual content by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Jalâl al-Din Rumi (Szymanowski set a Polish translation by poet Tadeusz Miciiiski of Joseph Freiherr von Hammer’s German model) because the poet-speaker contemplates the intoxicating energy of the Oriental night-sky and urges his companion to share in his epiphanic imaginative and prescient. Bold, trustworthy, wealthy of tone and at instances explosive, Spence communicated the erotic depth of the textual content which ends, ‘Silence binds my tongue,/ But I speak without a tongue tonight.’
Oramo judiciously balanced soloist, orchestra and refrain. The heightened depth of the massive tutti climaxes was countered by astonishing delicacy and transparency (some fantastically refined solos from chief Igor Yuzefovich got room and air to sing and breathe). The number of color was breath-taking – assume Klimt’s Byzantine golds and Klee’s keyboard of complementary hues.
And, so, in between the electrical energy and eroticism, Mozart cleansed our palettes – perhaps Oramo knew what he was doing when he deliberate this eclectic programme, in any case! Though the forces weren’t giant (and double basses have been seated), the BBCSO sound was a full and really current one all through the Sinfonia Concertante. Dalene and Ridout performed with the tutti forces at first of the Allegro maestoso, and whereas they did drop out earlier than their entry, I did really feel that this lowered the dramatic influence of that unison Eb-octave flip with which the soloists announce themselves. When the conversations obtained underway, vigour was allied with grace – maybe there was extra of the previous? Ridout was extra overtly communicative, Dalene pristine and infrequently creative with the phrasing. And, Oramo appeared eager to whip up the theatricality latent within the rating. Certainly, the shared smiles prompt that everybody was having terrific enjoyable. The decidedly off-score first-movement cadenza felt very ‘modern’ – mercurial, forthright, rhetorical.
The Andante felt somewhat too ‘pressing’ for me, lacking a sure lyrical ‘repose’, although that’s to not deny the emotional tensions which the duo evoked. The Presto danced with breezy confidence. The unaffected pleasure communicated was a pleasure. This was seemingly spontaneous, plain-speaking musicianship between pals which spoke to the various.
Claire Seymour