Yomiuri Nippon at The Anvil: an exceptional orchestra in a sometimes less than compelling programme

United KingdomUnited Kingdom Ifukube, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky: Christian Tetzlaff (violin), Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra / Sebastian Weigle (conductor). The Anvil, Basingstoke, 22.10.2024. (MBr)

Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra © YNSO

Akira Ifukube – Dance of the Seven Veils, from Salome
Beethoven – Violin Concerto
Tchaikovsky – Symphony No.4

Japanese orchestras are all too infrequent visitors to the United Kingdom – indeed, it had been more than thirty-years since the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra (known in Japan as the ‘Yomikyo’) last gave a concert here. Japan is largely an importer of classical music rather than an exporter of it when it comes to orchestral tours, but it is not until you hear a Japanese orchestra live that you do rather wish the balance was a bit more equalised than it is. Playing at their best, and depending on what the program is, the rewards of hearing most Japanese orchestras lives long beyond the concert itself.

There is no question that the sound of Japanese orchestras can divide opinion, but it is one which is distinctive (at least to my ears). The Yomikyo’s sonorities derives from enormous power – and this is often not subtle in how it is used compared with some European orchestras. It suits some composers (Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Bruckner) better than others (Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert). It is precise, but it is exceptionally rich in tone. Brass are better, more refined, today than they were several decades ago (they could be more Russian than Russian) but the strings, especially the cellos and double basses, have largely always sounded as if they are breaking through the crust of the earth.

I think this did make for some unusual anomalies in this concert – such as the performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto where the soloist and the orchestra were almost incompatible with each other. On the other hand, the first encore, Toru Takemitsu’s ‘Waltz’ from Face of Another (from the 1966 film by Hiroshi Teshigahara) seemed carefully calibrated to highlight that one great quality of this orchestra – its exceptional string tone.

The concert opened with Dance of the Seven Veils from Akira Ifukube’s ballet Salome. The composer is, of course, most well-known outside of Japan for his score of 1954’s Godzilla (and many of those for the subsequent films) – music that could not have been written without reference to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring itself. And this is rather the case with many works Ifukube composed after the Godzilla scores – this music, or rather the creature’s stomping theme, creeps into almost all of his classical music, too. The march rumbles early on in the dance (it is rather more persistent in the entire ballet score, if I recall) but beyond that Ifukube does successfully evoke an oriental flavour that is wonderfully vivid, especially in the woodwind. The climax is thrilling – a tour de force of orchestral writing, which showcased this orchestra’s virtuosity superbly. Richard Strauss’s Dance of the Seven Veils is the greater masterpiece but also more difficult to get the finer performance from (even Toscanini sometimes struggled here); Ifukube’s is, I think, the opposite of this, but this was thrilling and beautifully done.

The performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was not one of the most ideal I have heard, even if the acoustics of this hall gave it quite remarkable clarity. This greatest of violin concertos can certainly be interpreted in multiple ways but I do think that the soloist and conductor should be having the same conversation, and I am not sure they were in this performance. This is not a predominantly virtuosic work – and I do not think Christian Tetzlaff necessarily took a virtuosic route, despite fleet tempos (increasingly unfashionable these days in this concerto) – but it is a lyrical one. Sebastian Weigle – even with reduced strings – sometimes sounded to me as if he was in the wrong concerto entirely (the ‘Emperor’ came to mind) which would have been fine if Tetzlaff had the willingness to go along with this. Instead, Tetzlaff’s distant coolness was a feature from the start: the mysteriousness of the opening cadence where orchestra and violin should overlap didn’t really happen at all. His tendency to cut short the long lines, such as at the emotional core of the first movement where the violin soars over the strings in an ascending passage felt more of a flood than fluid playing. The intensity and rawness just were not really there either. If the Larghetto had one thing in its favour it didn’t overrun – anything excessively over ten or so minutes and it can become unmanageable. It was engaging, too, and I think Tetzlaff’s frigidness somewhat allowed him to make the complexity of the arabesques and trills seem like a virtuosic mosaic, albeit one that lacked a poetic narrative. The Rondo, too, was flighty but the tension one might expect to have heard between the dominant major and minor keys seemed missing. The coda swept away any idea that the soloist was supreme here; Weigle overwhelmed Tetzlaff and the reason Beethoven wrote the coda the way he did.

Tetzlaff played his own cadenzas for this performance – which he first began using back in the 1980s – based on Beethoven’s piano version of the Violin Concerto (with timpani accompaniment). Although it is rare to hear anything other than the Fritz Kreisler cadenzas it was welcome to have the Tetzlaff cadenza. However, even with cuts the violin has a number of weaknesses (and this is a general tendency with other cadenzas, too). The most important, I think, is the aristocracy and intensity of the Kreisler that gives it the quality of a great soliloquy. I felt this was missing in the Tetzlaff, unfortunately.

I had the choice of two symphonies for the Yomikyo’s tour – the Rachmaninoff Second in London, or the Tchaikovsky Fourth in Basingstoke. I chose the latter, a symphony I rarely hear live.

I think Japanese orchestras play Russian music superbly, although whether it is geography, history, or the influence of so many Russian and German conductors steeped in the music of Russian composers who have worked with Japanese orchestras – or a combination of all three – I am not entirely sure. Oddly, the dynamic of a Japanese conductor and a Japanese orchestra can be remarkable in Tchaikovsky: Hiroshi Iwaki and the NHKSO in the last three symphonies, which he recorded live in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example. But the Yomikyo’s also made one the best recordings of a Shostakovich Tenth and Eleventh with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (on Denon).

Sebastian Weigle needed no score for this performance of the Fourth – but this appeared to give him little freedom to make it a thrilling one. But perhaps this was not the intention here given the huge weight of the orchestra’s opening to the symphony: I am not sure I have ever heard these bars taken with such imposing grandeur (perhaps we were in the wrong symphony, as earlier we sounded as if we were in the wrong concerto). Horns were crushing – and the end chord before the repeat of the first phrase fell like the blade of a guillotine slicing through bone. The string descent was enormous – cellos black, double basses rumbling like a violent heat-breaking thunder. The return of the Fate motif was seismic rather than blistering. But the sheer weight of the playing made this all appear like slow-moving lava. When the final climax of the movement exploded – and it was pyroclastic – it felt inevitable rather than a shock – and if the coda should have felt it was increasing in speed, it moved with measured intensity instead, implacably, Fate not losing its dominance but retaining it.

The Andantino could hardly have been described as light, too. If the strings were rich, they also had a firmness and depth (but what beauty, too, such as at the cello theme later in the movement). What was magical here was the woodwind – balletic in its shaping, and gorgeously crystalline in its tone. The flute and bassoon staccatos were superlative. Some of the phrasing just floated and hovered around the orchestra. The third movement was quite remarkably done – indeed even this orchestra’s pizzicato playing has a sonority to it that I have rarely encountered with other orchestras. Weigle did not, I think, take the lightest of approaches here – think comic Shakespeare and you would probably not quite be on the right track – but the precision of the playing, the careful dynamics and the sheer beauty of it were jaw-dropping.

The final movement of this symphony can be one of the most hair-raising experiences – or it can rather fall flat. The Iwaki recording I mentioned above could almost be seen to be in danger of losing control of itself so dangerously fast does he take the tempo here – but it just manages to avoid blurring the edges between what an orchestra can and cannot do (something the NHKSO has been tortuously tested to do by some conductors – such as Jean Martinon in a notoriously fast Rite of Spring). Sebastian Weigle took a more leisurely pace, although in doing so he ratcheted up the tension in a way that many conductors largely avoid doing; in his hands, this movement felt like a tight coil being wound up until it suddenly had no option but to snap. The opening bars were very tightly done, but they also tumbled down rather than surged like a torrent. If the cymbals were percussive enough, I did rather wish the timpani (and especially the bass drum) were more raucous – a trait of many Japanese orchestras is a quite unreserved approach to timpani playing; here it felt quite the reverse. The double-speed section sounded right, and brass solos were eruptive before the Fate motif reappeared as if shot out of a catapult. The final cadence was brilliantly done – just a little more brooding than one perhaps normally hears it, but so in tune with the despair that inspired the symphony.

Not, I think, one of the most exhilarating performances of the Fourth I have heard but more than made up for by its dramatic intensity and darkness and some of the most compelling playing I have heard from an orchestra in this symphony.

As I wrote at the beginning of the review, the first encore – the Takemitsu Waltz – was carefully calibrated to showcase the Yomikyo’s strings and was an exquisite one. The second, Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No.1 in G minor was dashed off with panache and refinement.

I think one’s aspirations and one’s experience of this concert are probably a bit conflicted: an exceptional orchestra, but a rather less convincing programme. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 30 years for the Yomikyo to return to the UK.

Marc Bridle

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