United Kingdom Janáček, Martinů, Vaughan Williams: Laura van der Heijden (cello), Brno Philharmonic Orchestra / Dennis Russell Davies (conductor). St David’s Hall, Cardiff, 15.10.2022. (PCG)
Vaughan Williams – Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis
Martinů – Cello Concerto No.1
Janáček – Jealousy
Dvořák – Symphony No.9 ‘From the New World’
The Welsh National Opera will visit Brno next month to present their new production of The Makropoulos Affair. That is why this concert by the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra took on something of the nature of an exchange visit. It was the penultimate event in their current UK tour; they had already appeared in Bradford, Edinburgh, Middlesborough, Basingstoke (review here) and London. The programme was the same as in Edinburgh, but the WNO connection was reflected particularly in Janáček’s overture Jealousy. It was written for Jenůfa but the composer separated it from its parent opera, and it became long condemned to a somewhat shadowy independent existence. So, it made an interesting contrast to the highly successful WNO production of the complete opera earlier this year.
There were also WNO links with Martinů’s concerto, since many years ago the Welsh company had given the belated British première of the composer’s The Greek Passion (after the work was scandalously rejected by Covent Garden). A rumoured revival of that staging is perhaps not altogether out of the question. Be that as it may, it was a real joy to make the acquaintance of the rarely heard First Cello Concerto. This neo-classical jeu d’esprit sparkled with delight and was free of the somewhat dour earnestness that could sometimes afflict the composer in his struggles with symphonic form. The slow movement in particular had a luxurious chromatic warmth in the capable hands of Laura van der Heijden, a winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2012 when she memorably and enterprisingly chose Walton’s Cello Concerto for her final performance. Martinů’s score, originally written in 1931, was given in the revised 1955 version, but the differences did not seem very significant, mainly a matter of a few nips and tucks here and there.
The concert had opened with Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, a work presumably chosen to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s birth but a rather odd choice for this hall. The music was specifically written to be played originally in Gloucester Cathedral, itself a slightly odd choice since its austere Norman columns provide a severe contrast to the more filigree ‘perpendicular’ decoration of the music itself. In any event, a sense of space and distance is vital if one wants to achieve the proper effect of the atmosphere of the string writing (with two distinct bodies of players, a large group in the foreground featuring a solo string quartet, and a smaller group of players providing an echo in the ether). Without this sense of atmosphere, the passage of thematic material backwards and forwards from one group of players to the other can seem dangerously like mere doodling. There also is a temptation for conductors to speed up the delivery to avoid any sense of repetition. Unfortunately, in St David’s Hall it is simply not possible to provide for the sense of stereophonic distancing so essential to the music. Dennis Russell Davies made no attempt to supply this, as he simply placed the second orchestra immediately behind the first. On the other hand, he proved able to resist the impulse to compensate by the injection of any artificial excitement. He conjured an atmosphere of heavenly contemplation and stillness at the beginning, which endured throughout. One can nevertheless think of a great many alternative Vaughan Williams scores that could have provided a better tribute.
The closing item on the programme put the Brno Philharmonic on much more familiar territory. Their ease with Dvořák’s style – as so often with Czech orchestras – paid ample dividends in their handling of the Bohemian and Moravian folk melodies which the composer blended with American folk material for his symphony From the New World. It was simply impossible to find fault with this performance, beautifully and characterfully played, and invested with plenty of imaginative interpretative touches. Dennis Russell Davies earned our thanks and respect for the full repeat of the extensive first-movement exposition; it is vital in order to balance the respective weight of the various movements. The repeat served, too, to ratchet up the excitement in the rushing string passages leading to the low flute theme, which was played at a slightly slower speed and with an infectious lilt. One might have welcomed a slightly varied version of this phrasing on the repeat, but the return of the same touches was nonetheless welcome. The famous opening of the slow movement was not made too emotional by the cor anglais, so that the melodic echoes in the strings were even more haunting than usual. And the finale had all the required open-air atmosphere and excitement. One was forcibly reminded how much later American composers such as Copland owed to Dvořák’s example when they came to conjure up images of the American prairie.
We were given a brief but uproarious encore, which – I am sorry to have to return yet again to this old complaint! – Dennis Russell Davies failed to identify for the benefit of the audience. I think the piece might have been the interlude from Weinberger’s opera Schwanda the Bagpiper (not the better-known polka), but I might equally well be wrong. Such anonymity does little credit to the orchestra’s superlative performance. The audience, somewhat smaller than for the BBC NOW’s concert which opened the Cardiff 2022-2023 season last week, was highly enthusiastic.
Paul Corfield Godfrey