United Kingdom Farrenc, Mendelssohn, Brahms: Fumiaki Miura (violin), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Leslie Suganandarajah (conductor). Cadogan Hall, London, 18.10.2023. (MBr)
Farrenc – Overture No.1
Mendelssohn – Violin Concerto
Brahms – Symphony No.4
Putting two of the repertoire’s major works on the same programme, with a conductor making his debut with your orchestra, can be a risky business. One might be helped along, of course, with an extremely gifted soloist in a concerto – but you are rather left to sink or swim in a big symphony. This Royal Philharmonic Orchestra concert at Cadogan Hall conducted by the Sri Lankan-German conductor Leslie Suganandarajah was actually rather more than just good – it was pretty much a revelation.
Although born in Sri Lanka, Suganandarajah’s family fled the country during the civil war and settled in Germany where he has studied and lived since. He is, however, currently the Music Director of the Salzburg Landestheater and it is, I think, partly his flexibility and sensitivity to that theatrical medium which perhaps made his performances with the RPO of the Mendelssohn and Brahms so vibrant, free and magnetic – and in the end so thrilling to hear.
Of course, he couldn’t have managed the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto without the soloist, Fumiaki Miura. I have only come across this player on disc – in a superb recording of the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No.1. Japanese violin players can sometimes divide opinion – despite there having been many great ones like Takaya Urakawa, Takashi Shimitzu (still very much alive) and the tragic Shigeo Watanabe to name but three. That criticism often levelled at Japanese violinists is that they sometimes have a smaller sound and a tone which often lacks weight – and there is some truth to this, but it is variable and inconsistent in my view. Shimitzu, for example, spent some years studying with Jascha Heifetz and far from having a small sound he often mimics the Heifetz sound to a quite uncomfortable degree – but it certainly doesn’t undermine his greatness.
Today’s Japanese violinists tend to have a more western sound in many respects – and Fumiaki Miura is certainly a prime example of that (Shigeo Watanabe’s very short Western period, at Juilliard, was to end in tragedy after he returned to Japan; he abandoned the instrument entirely). Miura almost eschews the Eastern European sound one might have assumed he might have grown into for precisely that considerably warmer, larger and more Romantic one of Pinchas Zuckerman who has mentored this violinist for quite some time. At least that is the impression one got from this performance of the Mendelssohn Concerto which blossomed from the start and never shed a single flower throughout its span.
Jascha Heifetz – whom I mentioned earlier – claimed that the opening of the Mendelssohn was the most treacherous thing in the entire violin repertoire for a violinist to play in tune. No problems for Miura, though, who stitched all those E’s, G’s and B’s together with the silkiest of threads. Beauty there may have been to his playing but there was also capriciousness too. Exquisite arpeggios in triplets, that beautiful passage in the first movement where the soloist travels down several keys to rest on a low D-sharp was a magical exercise in trapping us into hearing the richness of his interpretation. The cadenza – so extraordinarily virtuosic in a concerto which sometimes shies away from this – had everything: fierce double-stopping, arpeggios that roared into flight. There was no denying not just the crystalline precision of the playing, but also the dynamic brilliance of it, a thrust that even at this halfway point had an energy that was fearless.
There was unaffected purity, even a soaring beauty, to much of the middle movement. It can sometimes sound a little cloying, a touch over sweet, but here it was tastefully done – in part because Miura brought an outsize tone to his playing which gave some muscle to the phrasing. The ringing brilliance of a high C (just as majestic as the contrasting sonority he brought to his low D) felt like he was resting on the summit of a mountain before the triple octave descent downwards as Miura took us towards the interlinked finale.
There is something of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream about this movement, of the world of Titania and Oberon. Just a little imagination (or perhaps rather more than that) should come from the soloist. That muscularity from the preceding movement gave way to a fluttering lightness, a skittishness, of the violin dancing around the orchestra – the capriciousness of Miura’s playing pushing back against the militarism of the orchestral troop, until eventually he came into line with them in a unison that was never in doubt as to its conclusion. As with so much of the playing in this performance, he barely accelerated towards the closing bars – and in this sense this felt unfashionably from another era, but so refreshingly so. There is a difference, I think, between understated and just classic and refined – and Miura’s Mendelssohn, with an accompaniment that was on the same page, fell distinctly into the second of those. A highly individual, and rather special performance, I think.
Brahms’s Fourth Symphony was equally imaginative; indeed, I cannot remember when I have been so absorbed by a performance of this symphonic masterpiece.
Brahms did not write a single bad symphony – he just composed greater ones. I think the secret to Leslie Suganandarajah’s performance was to basically acknowledge this and persuade the RPO that this was the case too. It wasn’t just that the orchestra’s playing was so electrifying – and it was – it was also that it had unusual strengths in the solo work which one often doesn’t hear in this symphony. I did find some of the solo work disproportionately off the scale – the solo horn in the development was so explosive as to be like several mega tons of dynamite it was so powerful. But largely the playing was as magnificent as the vision of this symphony’s architectural span.
Suganandarajah didn’t make the mistake of making this performance overly expansive – in fact, it felt remarkably similar to ones that Karajan gave in live concerts in the early 1980s, Brahms that breathed out fire rather than the ashy smoke from them. The expansiveness of the opening was short on breadth, but only just; the broad sweeping phrase on the strings before the woodwind and horns was emphatic, but rich in tone, rather than just swingeing in its scale. With an emphasis on the voices of the solo oboe, or a trio of flute, clarinet and horn dotted throughout the pages of the score the scope of the performance was in playing to its dramatic side rather than more majestic side of the writing. Suganandarajah’s swiftness gave the first movement an irresistible momentum that made musical sense – the slightly quicker tempo seemed more logical when the flutes and bassoons cascaded downwards, for example, outbursts on the timpani were like firecrackers, and not nebulous in their fussiness. The coda, one of the greatest in the symphonic canon, was ferocious: strings fenced against each other like rapiers, the principal theme was hammered out on solid iron but it was the voraciousness and savagery of the closing pages that proved most powerful, so utterly un-Brahmsian but then these closing bars are unlike Brahms in every sense anyway so perhaps it felt exactly right.
The Andante moderato was swift – this is a movement which can’t just drag, it can often dismantle the flow of a performance irreparably. What gorgeous pizzicato we got, cascading like a shimmering waterfall from the violins down to the basses; when the bows were finally placed on the strings there were no sweeping gestures of high Romanticism, instead a striking tonal blend that matched the woodwind triplets. When that magnificent melody on the cellos appeared it was so expressive – Suganandarajah’s moment of opera in this Brahms symphony where the instruments were at the vocal greatest, where every note had the gesture of a breathing register from the voice. When the theme moved to violins and then violas it was like a trio of singers. Just superlative stuff.
The third movement Allegro seemed to melt like ice in a furnace so quickly did it start and finish – yet oddly it never seemed rushed. There was bounce to the playing, a little bit of humour, too: if the crescendos had the roars of a lion, then some of the woodwind almost tinkered like bells. The last movement, also an Allegro, was just stellar and like the previous one just seemed to pass in no time at all something, I am pretty sure, I have never once encountered in a live performance of this symphony. The way the music here – a number of variations, written as a vast passacaglia – seemed both ephemeral and timeless was slightly unusual, but remarkable. I did wonder, however, if it was the operatic side of Suganandarajah’s conducting, and the sheer fluency of it, which made each variation just float effortlessly into the next one that gave the sense of acoustic space to the performance that made us unaware of the time this movement simply took. I wondered at the end of listening to this whether not noticing the repeating horn variations mattered – or if it was a distinctive fault in the performance that did make this a crucial error in Suganandarajah’s conducting. Having said that some things were noticeable for the way they stood out – and they stood out like candles in an otherwise blackened room. The Bachian figuration in the violins; the imposing trombones that sound as if they are pronouncing a sermon. The staccato quavers that speak to one another in the woodwind and strings; and then the vocalised flutes, oboes and clarinets that sing beside the streaming quavers in the strings. Perhaps these all stood out more clearly just because this particular conductor had the affinity to make an orchestra shine light on these details. The coda, when it arrived, however, was every bit as thrilling as the first movement’s had been – dramatic, and, yes, like the climactic close to the last scene of a great final act.
Louise Farrenc’s Overture No.1 had opened this concert. Imposing it might be on its first couple of pages, but it loses its way soon afterwards, not helped by a long repeat of the opening statement which makes the overture sound overworked for little musical purpose. A fine performance can rarely rescue dull music, and that was certainly the case here.
But outstanding Mendelssohn and Brahms made for a concert full of revelations. An exceptional soloist and conductor, and an orchestra on inspirational form, made for an evening that was of uncommon quality.
Marc Bridle