The Mother of all shows . . .

There are times when I wonder what on earth comes over Prommers, why they will applaud and stamp over a performance I think was barely worth a polite tapping of fingers against palms.

Tonight's Prom 58 (New York Philharmonic/Maazel) was one of those. My colleague on this blog suggested I ought to warn you in advance that I could not share their enthusiasm for Mother Goose, The Miraculous Mandarin or Tchaikovsky's 4th.

I left before the encores (all three pre-arranged: the Albert Hall stewards knew there were going to be three, and the timings, by the way) and, if I could have done so inconspicuously, would have before the start of the second movement of the Tchaikovsky.

All three performances were pieces of showmanship, and in my view (obviously not shared by a rather large proportion of the audience) were travesties of the music they are supposed to be. The Mother Goose, was simply flat-footed, splayed out in a soft glow of self-congratulatory playing that simply washed over the Albert Hall like Pears coal-tar soap; the Miraculous Mandarin a jagged unkempt mess that sounded as though it was some mash-up of three different SUV's  being run off a Detroit car production line without any quality controllers, and the best  that I would want to say of the Tchaikovsky was that it was often VERY LOUD. It ended like a high-speed train wreck.

When I see three-quarters of the orchestra on stage more than twenty minutes before the performance is due to start, and I realise that they are not tuning, but apparently rehearsing whole stretches of the programme to come (and as separate sections, at that) cynical journo that I am, I wonder why? It's not something I recall ever having witnessed before, and a horrible noise it was too.

I think I found the answer in the performances, because, assuming all three were Maazel's conception, then the members had to play in a manner that could hardly be called natural. Unless, of course, they had had too little rehearsal time in the morning.

It's incumbent on me, I suppose, to explain more precisely why I thought the Ravel was pitiful, the Bartok grotesque and the Tchaikovsky, well, 'gross'. In other words, the very tricks, shallow showmanship and idiosyncracies that so amused me the night before in the Gershwin, applied to tonight's programme, particularly in the  Bartok, I loathed. 

I'll fill you in, I suppose. Just give me a little  time to cool down. And hire a bodyguard . . .

RAH Live

Prom 58: Ravel (Mother Goose); Bartok (The Miraculous Mandarin); Tchaikovsky (Symphony No 4); Lorin Maazel, New York Philharmonic.

Prom 37: Peacocks, Pride, Perdition and Fall

Tonight’s conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, said of Ravel’s La Valse that it is “the apotheosis of the Viennese waltz . . .leading to death”. In his hands, and those of the Gothenberg Symphony, that was the very least of it.

It began so darkly, so threateningly, that it could have been the soundtrack to a horror movie. In this ballroom, somewhere behind a garlanded and gilded column, lurked Baron Samedi; the dancers would have seen only the evening dress, but been just aware, in the corner of their eyes, of the white grinning skull under the top hat . . . This was the last dance of the Hapsburg dynasty, blithely pretending to be unaware that their Vienna was no longer holy. nor Roman. nor an Empire, and the chandeliers (I didn’t pinch this from Gerald Larner’s notes; I read them later, honest) would soon crash to the floor and the mirrors be shelled into shards.

This waltz was the Viennese, stately, but doomed, dancing away from the Sachertorte, out of Vienna, ending dazedly alongside the Archduke’s carriage in Sarajevo, just before the bomb exploded half the world. There have been some truly enlightening interpretations of Ravel this season like the Bolero; this was most certainly another. “You should see whatever comes through the music,” Ravel said. And what an extraordinary, cleverly-coloured moving (in both senses) picture Dudamel and his Gothenberg band gave us to watch.

A lot of colours, tempi changes, opium . . .so Dudamel on the Symphonie Fantastique. “If it’s sometimes crazy, sometimes ugly, it will be perfect.”

And, with a lot of colours, changes in tempi, sometimes crazy, sometimes ugly, so it was. And the opium? I’ll come to that. The first movement was not ugly at all; an opium haze from the growling basses, the kind of sharply defined colours you only see through pinpoint pupils when you’ve taken drugs striking through it, and a growing tension that prefigured all the themes in the subsequent movements.

This was not a day-trip through storyville with a bland guide speaking a commentary on the coach, this performance. Rather a psychological journey that forced you into travelling along the synapses of Berlioz’s psyche half in the dark. And, to appreciate it fully, needing at least an inkling of Jungian archetypes and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and the psychological horror stories both can become.
In challenging contrast, the ball was almost purely lyrical. Adolescents dancing together; unaware of the implications of their fall, the boy not anticipating rejection. I’ve been to that ball (as disco, of course); hoped with that same assurance. Been shamed and shocked by rejection later. Haven’t we all? It was all there; conducted with such calmness, but such tightening tension in recognising our knowledge of what was to come in the story, that at the end, someone in the audience actually screamed at being released. I can understand that.

There was nothing of the pretty-pretty pastoral in the third movement. This was sexually highly charged; shepherds as lovers, the rolling timpani presaging pre-coital anxiety withdrawal and (unfulfilled) post-coital tristesse, the storm psychological, not meteorological. I did feel, however, that the Gothenberg was being stretched here just beyond its skills in trying to attain the full range of colour and textures I think Dudamel was after. Nor, at times, I thought, could they entirely cope with the tempi being demanded of them. But the last bars were of immense pathos that long outlasted their mere seconds of real time. The audience seemed to have been made palpably uncomfortable by it. Again, I’m not surprised.

So then, in the ‘March to the Scaffold’ there was ugliness, and sharp changes in tempi, and bitter grinding horns, emphasised by sudden alterations form f to mf. This was no proud, head-held-high walk to the executioner. In Britain, we imagine the scaffold as a hangman’s platform which all but perhaps a bare handful of people now alive know only from drawings and photographs; the victim, resigned, the march a funereal one. This was a bloodstained gory guillotine. This was hands clawing in fear at the ladder, nails stripped to the root on the rungs in desperation to escape, eyes rolling in terror at that high gleaming steel blade poised to fall and send gouts of blood pulsing in waves from the severed neck. This was ‘crazy’, the nightmare you wake from but cannot escape, and that leaves you as horror-struck awake as you were asleep and feels as though it will never fade.

So to the ‘Sabbath’. A wild gallop of spectres in a mad rush to perdition, a Totentanz beyond Ravel’s worst nightmares, even with his experience of the War, with near-crazy rhythms that almost got out of control, but that Dudamel just—just—kept under control. Although they worked desperately hard, I’m not sure the Gothenberg entirely caught the shivery, hyper (hysterical, in the Freudian sense) conclusion to the movement that I think Dudamel was attempting, but one could not help but be caught up in it and, perhaps, filling it out from one’s own imagination.

Yes, this Fantastique was flawed in parts, technically, but it was a great conception, and they can be easily ignored when, like tonight, you find in a symphony you thought you knew, there is still more to be discovered, more to be experienced, and so differently. The audience applause was riotous and just went on and on. Quite right too.

I have been looking for a successor to Argenta, off and on, for years. Gustavo Dudamel, I am pretty sure after tonight, is it and Los Angeles is to be envied next year, as long as they give him his head. I just hope to god he avoids small planes. We can’t afford to have the same thing happen twice.

I shall return to Anders Hillborg’s fascinating and superbly played Clarinet Concerto [‘Peacock Tales’] shortly. It fits neatly, and this can come as no surprise now we can see where it’s all been leading, into this season’s edgy slightly off-the-wall jazz-cum-modernist-cum Romantic subtext.

Don’t dismiss it; as attention-grabbing—and attention-holding—and as much a ‘quasi-ballet’ as La Valse, as scary in its way as the ‘Walk to the Scaffold’ . . . Clever , unsuspected programming link there. And R3 followed up with a very interesting interview-cum-concert with him afterwards, a “Prom Composer’s Portrait” which I recommend to you via ‘Listen Again’ if you found the peacock a bit tough to chew on. In fact, it might be a good idea to listen to that first, if contemporary composers unnerve you.

If you want to hear ‘Tzigane clarinet’, however, do listen to Martin Frost’s cheery little encore piece, ‘Be Happy’ “arranged by [his] little brother” that trailed the peacock’s tail. The audience and I were, tonight, with this Prom. Very. So Dudamo gave us two encores; a Stenhammer piece to soothe the breasts that he’d ruffled with psycho-savagery in the Berlioz, and unsettled with La Valse, and then the brass section chucked their (not so strait) jackets away . . . And we had a fizzy little Latin rhumba to clap and stamp to.

I love these little sherbet sweeties conductors give us at the Proms sometimes as a thank you for working our brains hard—and actually paying out our hard-earned fivers for it, too—for the previous couple of hours. And it’s great fun.

What is all that crap about British stiff upper lips, eh? We can be very serious when we have to be, but we do know how to enjoy ourselves as well, you know; just as much as anybody from South America. Weird, and almost incongruous, as I daresay it might sound at the end of a night like this to some listeners abroad. It’s part of what makes the Proms, and possibly us Prommers, unique. And what attracts orchestras and conductors from around the world to come thousands of miles sometimes for just a night or two: it can’t possibly be the fees the BBC pays . . .

R3 Relay

Prom 37: Gothenberg Symphony Orchestra/Dudamel: Ravel: La Valse; Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique; Hillborg: Clarinet Concerto

I forgot to mention THE BELLS . . . (The capital letters are mandatory, to give you an idea what they sounded like.) Where did they nick them from? Westminster Abbey? Whitechapel Bell Foundry? I've never heard them ring like that . . .  And I found out what the two encores were, didn't write them down, and now I've forgotten them as well and I'm going to have to look them up again . . .

Prom 27: Bananas, Belle Epoque, and Waterlilies

I think I can predict most reviewers' reactions* to this Prom's Bolero, that is, if any bother to do any more than dismiss it in a couple of lines. So I shall try to get my retaliation in first. Tonight's performance had much more substance than a mere ice lollipop handed out to the audience on a hot stifling evening to thank them for sitting (or standing) through the serious stuff.

It actually made, as these programmes sometimes (and sometimes very mischievously) do, connections (musical, I mean, not ideological) with what had gone before that you don’t expect: most obviously in a kind of temporal or epochal consanginuity with the Stravinsky, but also with Benjamin’s own piece which I'll write about later. His decision to follow the Pavane pour une infante defunte directly without a pause, which might have appeared whimsical, actually did make contextual sense.

Benjamin set that neatly in a pre-war decade, before the world lost both its innocence and its money for the first time, or so people once said, as it has again all too many times even in George Benjamin’s lifetime.

It was clear that he and the BBCSO were mentally and emotionally in France, and not even within sight of the Spanish border. There was nothing of Velasquez here; there was the delicate colouring of a Monet watercolour in the strings and the harp, backlit with flashes of the richer colouring and fleshiness of a Renoir nude in sometimes very darkly coloured strings.

This, you had the feeling, was une infante who had an inkling she was destined to become defunte later in that equally drug-riddled, psychologcally edgy era of the kind we think we’ve invented that was also the belle epoque—and was dancing away her last years of adolescence. It was a very stylish, beguiling, knowing, cleverly constructed performance.

And now forget (please, it’s about time we, or at least we the Brits did) that ice skating Bolero that’s blighted the poor orphaned thing again for the last umpteen years. Benjamin’s was well into the post war belle epoque this time, but with the crash impending any moment: no flossy evocation of prancing wasp-waisted, slim-hipped matadors, this was cigarette factory sex, bosoms, Josephine Baker and sultry dancing in skirts made of bananas.

At times it was so sensuous, thanks to the swaying smoky jazz cafe woodwinds with their clever touch of syncopation, you could have rolled cigars on its thighs. It was the jazz era hitting Paris—as interpreted by Gertrude Stein.

Robert Maycock of the Independent wrote in the notes “all that happens in Boléro, apart from the big harmonic surprise close to the end, is that a pulse continues unchanged, and alternating melodic lines return in changing orchestral colours. On another, Ravel lavished all his sophisticated skill on making a substantial, perfectly timed form out of these few dimensions. You just try making a crescendo build for 10 minutes.” Benjamin had no diffculty at all with that; he made it sound simple.

And it was tense, a tension that increased relentlessly almost bar by bar until its climax. And, probably, had they heard this performance, also that of both Alice B Toklas and Gertrude Stein.

But it was the jazz-influenced orchestral colours of both the woodwind and the brass that made it sound as though there was a lot more happening than usual; some of those melodic lines suddenly and unexpectedly growling threateningly and anguished out of the brass section like a very big Parisian Apache with a knife looming out of the back door of a subterannean club in a dark Parisian alleyway . . . There was a strong hint of that dark underbelly of the period that Cocteau lived in in that.

Someone, whose name I missed because I had my head in the fridge looking for some ice for my whisky, commented in the interval that George Benjamin has an impeccable sense of pace, and doesn’t he just. It must be the envy of a good many far more experienced conductors.

And that, if you want to get back to the way Ravel probably thought of it at the beginning before he practically obliged himself to disown it, is just what the Bolero must have as a base to lift it from the banal rigmarole it so often has become. No way would Ravel have made the complaint he did to Toscanini that it was too fast. The acceleration was perfection.

You can tell me I’m just a kid still, if you want, I don’t damn well care, but I found tears of sheer joy running down my cheeks listening to this Bolero, and I'm not at all surprised that both the audience and the conductor were wearing grins as broad as Josephine Baker's hips when the applause and cheers erupted.

It was one of those prom endings that sends you away happier, or at least reassured, with life; even when, as with tonight’s other pieces either side of the interval, you have also felt the fingers of its traumas counting down your vertebrae and pausing ominously one handspan to the left, and wonder what it’s all really for. Even the weather gods must have felt something of all that; in the minutes after the concert ended the darkening violet London sky over Kensington was lit up with vivid flashes of lightning.

There is some Messaien, like some Boulez, I just cannot manage, try as I might, and believe me, I really have tried over the years. The orchestral L’Ascension is one I’ve had to give up on. It struck me that Benjamin was conducting it more as a pupil of Alexander Goehr than as a Messaien accolyte, but other than that I will leave it to Evan at PromsAmerica, Classical Iconoclast or Boulezian to give you a better insight than I can into how it went.

The Prommers (and the BBCSO through the season) have a few conductors they fall in love with and hug to their hearts. When you’re in the hall, the feeling is tangible even before the concert starts; and if you listen to the broadcast recording, you’ll sense it even in that, because George Benjamin is one of them. John Adams, any American readers might be surprised to hear, is another.

(I do hope I don’t get into Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner with my cigar-rolling metaphor or Gertrude Stein. . . If you don’t believe me about this, and I can tell already you probably don't, you still have six days to catch this Prom on the iPlayer. Listen to it all the way through, but ignore the couple of accidental squeaks from the horns in the Bolero—it was a hot, humid, muggy night and the stage lights would have been very hot on them by then, none of that good for horns—in one bar, they don’t matter.)

* My predictions don't always come true.  At least Andrew Clements in The Guardian didn't write it off, and nor did Neil Fisher in the Times, so  there's hope yet. . . My  crystal ball must have gone out of tune. I did use an A=440 tuning fork last time, didn't  I?

(R3 relay)

Prom 27: Ravel: Pavane pur une infante defunte, Bolero