The attraction for Prom 48 was Beethoven's Fifth; the deterrents were Haukur Tomasson's Magma and Leifs' Geysir. Somewhere in between, which could have been either challenging or lollipop=-flavoured was Schumann's A minor piano concerto.
Probably, the less said about Magma the better. A series of eruptions it was Ligeti-in-a-china-shop, scalded a bit on the soles of the feet and hopping around smashing into the crockery. For a good ten minutes more than its invention could really sustain.
The other new piece was very different. I had been persuaded to go to this Prom by my friend and sometime colleague here, who had heard some of Leifs' work on Radio 3 and said it sounded very interesting. And so it was: energetic, vivid, colourful and coherent. And, possibly, leaving some of the gallery-goers possibly unable to hear the quieter beginning of the Beethoven 5 that followed, unless the BBC offered them free earplugs.
The gallery in the RAH has become, over the years something of an extension of the stage down below. And sonically a very effective one that seems to have become increasingly exploited as its possibilities (an unforeseen side-effect of the acoustic re-arrangement of the 'flying saucers' some years back, I suspect) have dawned.
On my way back up to the Circle after my interval cigarette, I was in the lift with two sound technicians clutching battery packs, one of whom appeared to be explaining something to the other about miking the 'timps on the left'. Seated again, noting two sets of timps in the orchestra, I scanned the left-hand set curious to see some novel microphone set up., but spotted nothing unusual. It was only when two sets of timps burst into glorious thundering action at each end of the gallery I realised just why they had been going up in the lift instead of down. Incredibly dramatic; and very, very loud.
I'm not immune, of course, and nor are a lot of prommers, to the slightly embarrassing syndrome Beecham once took us all to task for when he said the English don't really like music, they just like the noise it makes. But there is 'good' noise' and just 'noise', and that particular noise was very good, musically speaking. I had not come across Leifs before, but for all that Geysir was fairly obviously programmatic and descriptive he is a composer to be searched out.
I have, over the years, whether rightly or wrongly, become increasingly impatient with young (or 'new') pianists. Biss showed, as these relative newcomers so often do, considerable technical expertise and spirit; but a concerto of any kind is not really a two-sided display of virtuosity between opposing forces, the soloist on the one side and the orchestra on the other as this was. There's an illuminating paragraph in Biss's own biographical page:
"Mr. Biss’ enthusiasm manifested itself from the very beginning of his studies, far exceeding his six year-old physical and intellectual capacities. This enthusiasm (or, if you take the word of Mr. Biss’s friends and associates, “obsessiveness” and “neurosis”) remains today. . ."
Indeed it does, or at least did on Friday night. But I do not really want to hear obsessive neuroticism in Schuman's piano concerto Op 54.
Volkov played a pretty straight Beethoven's Fifth, which wasn't going to strain the audience's concentration or test their patience, yet was full of discreet instrumental textures—albeit occasionally a little cloudy or maybe under-emphatic, that made me almost wish the Icelanders had been playing 'authentic' instruments. They played this not quite small-scale, but avoided very neatly any symptom of the bombastic.
The Iceland Symphony Orchestra is very good indeed, with lovely woodwind textures. Oh, yes: and timpanists who moonlight as Icelandic strongmen who could no doubt smother a geyser with their bare hands?
No comments:
Post a Comment