United States 2023 Tanglewood [3] – Wagner and Mozart: Martin Helmchen (piano), Boston Symphony Orchestra / David Afkham (conductor). Koussevitzky Music Shed, Lenox/Stockbridge, MA, 22.7.2023. (CSa)
Wagner- Siegfried Idyll
Mozart – Piano Concerto No.25 in C, K.503; Symphony No.41 in C, K.551, Jupiter
Richard Wagner declared that Mozart’s music and Mozart’s orchestra are a perfect match. This claim was recently put to the test at Tanglewood when the players of Boston Symphony Orchestra, under guest conductor David Afkham, embarked on an exhilarating programme comprising Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and two late Mozart masterpieces: his pre-penultimate Piano Concerto No.25 in C, K.503, and his last symphony, No.41 in C – the Jupiter.
Afkham is a highly gifted young German conductor of Iranian descent whose most formative experience was spent with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Concertgebouw, and the London Symphony Orchestra where he assisted his revered mentor, the late Bernard Haitink. Imbued with a deep love of opera (he made his Glyndebourne debut in an acclaimed La traviata in 2014, and a production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at Stuttgart Opera in 1917), Afkham’s interests also lie in the core Austro/German symphonic repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
The concert opened with a serene presentation of the Siegfried Idyll. Wagner adapted the orchestral version of this work from a string quartet he wrote in 1876 for Cosima, his wife of four months, which he arranged to have played each year on her birthday. Afkham, relinquishing his baton, used his expressive hands to coax and mould a performance of great intensity and the utmost delicacy. Expansive strings, impressively led by Associate Concertmaster Alexander Velinzon, muted horns, trumpet and woodwind combined to give a lush and sensuous reading of Wagner’s musical love letter.
Next came the Mozart Piano Concerto in C, K.503, and Berlin-based Martin Helmchen to play it. Helmchen who, at 41 years old, retains the youthful looks and energy of an artist half his age. He has recorded all Mozart’s late piano concertos, and recently described K.503 as one of the composer’s grandest and most underestimated. He points out that the piece has an abundance of ideas and melodic inventions so big, that it defies the confines of the conventional concerto form. Partnered sensitively by the BSO, he played the first movement Allegro maestoso with crystalline beauty, the notes cascading irrepressibly like a pure mountain stream, to which he added an ornate and impeccably articulated cadenza. The overlapping textures of the muted Andante were spaciously phrased and feather light. In the Allegretto, swelling woodwind, strings and piano intertwined elegantly before the full orchestra joined in an exuberant ending, its symphonic overtones providing the perfect segue to the work in the second half of the programme, Mozart’s Jupiter.
While Afkham’s reading of Mozart’s ground-breaking symphony was full-blooded and geared to the traditional forces of a modern orchestra, the sound produced by BSO had all the subtlety of an historically informed period chamber group. The opening Allegro vivace was taken at an invigorating pace without rushing the carefully-balanced conversation between the first and second violins or obscuring contributions from other sections of the band. A gracefully refined Andante gave way to a sprightly spring-in-the-step Menuetto which in turn led to a joyous Finale, brimming with spirit and vibrancy. Wagner was right! Mozart’s music and his orchestra were in every detail, perfectly matched.
2023 Tanglewood [4] – Yehudi Wyner, Sofia Gubaidulina, Shulamit Ran, Robert Schumann: Andreas Haefliger (piano: Schumann), Randal Hodgkinson (piano: Gubaidulina), Boston Symphony Orchestra Members (Haldan Martinson [violin], Steven Ansell [viola], Blaise Déjardin [cello], Edwin Barker [double bass], Elizabeth Rowe [flute], John Ferrillo [oboe], William R. Hudgins [clarinet], Richard Svoboda [bassoon], Richard Sebring [horn], Elizabeth Klein [flute], Alexander Velinzon [violin II: Ran], Cathy Basrak [viola II: Ran], Oliver Aldort [cello II: Ran]). Seiji Ozawa Hall, Lenox, MA, 26.7.2023.
Yehudi Wyner – Into the evening air, for wind quintet
Sofia Gubaidulina – Sonata for double bass and piano
Shulamit Ran – Lyre of Orpheus
R. Schumann – Piano Quintet in E-flat, Op.44
It has been said that the true test of musicians is not the orchestra itself, but rather in the trios, quartets and quintets of those within it. Whether you agree with that view or not, last week’s recital at Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and Symphony Orchestra Members provided an opportunity for some of their outstanding instrumentalists to be heard and appreciated in smaller groups.
Pulitzer Prize winning American composer Yehudi Wyner claims that his wind quintet ‘Into the evening air’ evokes the last lines of an elegiac poem by Wallace Stevens, and that the ‘profoundly consoling’ progression of the poem resonates with the music. The piece, impressionistic and ephemeral, suggests a shifting, twilight journey of loss, sadness, consolation and resolution. The five principal winds of the BSO played with consummate skill. Oboe (John Ferrillo), clarinet (William Hudgins), and bassoon (Richard Svoboda) tapped the plangent, reedy depths of their instruments to create Wyner’s melancholy twilight soundworld. The eerie atmosphere was punctuated with moments of fluttering anxiety from Richard Sebring’s horn, but tensions were ultimately released by Elizabeth Rowe’s soaring flute.
There was no such resolution to be found in Soviet composer Sofia Gubaidulina’s Sonata for double bass and piano. Written in 1975 during the last decade of the Russian Gulag and judged ‘unacceptable’ by the authorities, this unrelentingly stark piece was hauntingly played by the BSO’s principal bass Edwin Barker, accompanied by pianist Randall Hodgkinson. There is little connection between the two instruments. This creates a feeling of isolation which might suggest incarcerated prisoners making futile attempts to communicate their pain to the outside world. Although the austere sixteen-minute conversation faultlessly performed between bass and piano intrigued some members of the audience, not everyone connected with the work. ‘Do you want to go?’ barked one elderly gentleman to his wife, anticipating similar difficulties with the next item on the programme, Shulamit Ran’s Lyre of Orpheus. ‘Yes’ she said, ‘I don’t want to stay either, but I want to find out why!’ Her patience paid off.
Lyre of Orpheus by Israeli/US composer Shulamit Ran is a sextet, scored for two violins, two violas and two cellos. The title of this fifteen-minute piece emerged once the composition had been completed. It refers to Apollo’s lyre, which empowered his son Orpheus to charm objects and living beings. A delicate fretwork of strings underscores a series of plaintive folk-like melodies, and summon up an ethereal underworld, which in colour and texture, is reminiscent of late Bartók. In this performance the first cello, expressively played by Blaise Déjardin, sang out the sorrowful central melody, while the other players joined in moments of lively conversation and helped to capture the work’s dramatic shifts of mood.
The second half was dominated by one work: Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat, which in many ways represents the pinnacle of nineteenth-century Romantic chamber music, and the ultimate expression of Schumann’s multi-layered personality. The pianist Andreas Haefliger joined BSO violinists Haldan Martinson and Alexander Velinzon, violist Steven Ansell and cellist Blaise Déjardin, to give a captivating and illuminating account of this mercurial work. The ebullience of the Allegro brillante was followed by a tender, almost fragile slow movement in which the five players blended as if they had performed together for decades. The Scherzo was rich and spirited and the final Allegro sublime. Hats off to the BSO and to the individual players within its ranks.
Chris Sallon