United Kingdom Bacewicz, Busoni: Kirill Gerstein (piano), BBC Symphony Chorus (men’s voices), BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo (conductor). Barbican Hall, London, 1.11.2024. (CK)
Gražyna Bacewicz – Symphony No.2
Busoni – Piano Concerto
This was an evening when Sakari Oramo put us further in his debt: and I am not even talking about the main event. 20 years ago, during his tenure with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, he made handsome amends for the neglect of the early-twentieth century English composer John Foulds; with his BBC Symphony Orchestra he continues to champion the Croatian composer Dora Pejačević, having memorably performed her symphony during last year’s BBC Proms; and he opened this concert with the Second Symphony of Polish composer Gražyna Bacewicz. He has already recorded her Third and Fourth Symphonies; I have not heard them, and this performance was my first experience of Bacewicz’s music.
A violin virtuoso, a busy and committed lynchpin of Polish musical life, a pupil of Wanda Landowska, a composer whose neo-classical instincts had to be tempered (at the time she wrote this symphony) by Stalinist Socialist Realism; she is a fascinating figure. This work comes relatively early in a stylistic trajectory that was to be influenced by Bartók, then serialism and the avant-garde: but on the evidence of this symphony she has a strong and individual voice, and a musical integrity which marks her out as no mere follower of fashion. She died in 1969, but I write of her as a contemporary: the immediacy of her music makes her so.
The first movement is headed Con passione. Spacious, sonorous strings with an undertow of quietly menacing low brass and timpani generate passion, and tension too: this gives way to lyrical music formed from a texture of individual voices – woodwinds and horn. The gestures are firm and confident, the tone mostly dark in colour, the contrasts clear – a shaft of light from the woodwinds against pizzicato strings; a brief but emphatic upsurge of brass to end. The slow movement (Lento tranquillo) begins with a rather mysterious chant on the winds over softly pacing pizzicato strings. A horn sounds over Sibelian rustlings; the chant returns over a three-note ostinato on the double basses, and the music recedes over a quiet side drum and the ostinato figure transferred to the timpani.
The Scherzo and Finale put the orchestra through its paces, and they responded with playing of rhythmic sharpness, bite and brilliance. In his programme note Paul Griffiths detected the Eroica behind the busy Beethovenian bustling of the strings in the Scherzo; but it put me in mind of the corresponding movement of Havergal Brian’s Third Symphony (Brian’s Eroica, if you will – how I wish I could hear Oramo and the BBC SO getting their teeth into that). Bacewicz certainly knows how to write a briskly triumphant ending: snap, crackle and pop.
This superb performance made the best possible case for the symphony: 20 minutes of consistent and constantly evolving energy. It refreshingly avoids monumentality – its optimism is a much leaner and tauter thing than the type favoured by Stalin’s apparatchiks. Griffiths commented on the audible influence of Stravinsky and Bartók: yet to my untutored ear there is a Nordic strain too.
We were chiefly there, though, for Ferruccio Busoni. Kirill Gerstein’s performance of the Piano Concerto was simply staggering. Benjamin Grosvenor’s performance at this year’s Proms, with Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, triumphantly conveyed its epic qualities, its grandeur; even – with an invisible male chorus in the Royal Albert Hall’s Gallery – its transcendence. Gerstein’s performance, superbly matched by Oramo and the BBC SO, certainly wasn’t short of epic grandeur, but in the Barbican Hall’s acoustic – Gerstein front and centre of a crowded stage – the spotlight was on the extraordinary range and variety of his pianism.
Back in March in this hall, in George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto with Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra, I found his playing percussive almost to the point of brutality; but Gerstein is a thoughtful musician rather than simply a Klaviertiger. He produced all the cascading thunder the piece demands, and in the delicate passages he sprayed notes like tiny droplets; the music’s structural contours were firmly placed by a strong left hand.
The concerto rests on the mighty pillars of the first, third and fifth movements. The central Pezzo serioso, 20 minutes long and in four continuous sections, is perhaps where the challenge to the audience’s concentration is greatest; not here, though the work’s furthest reaches of fantasy and brilliance are attained in the intervening Pezzo giocoso and Tarantella (reminders that Busoni himself was an almost superhuman pianist, and that he bestrode his native Italian as forcefully as his adopted German culture). Gerstein’s playing – whether sparkling like a heap of diamonds or pounding like a ship’s engine – had to be heard to be believed, but Oramo and the BBC SO were equally inspired: the relationship between soloist, conductor and orchestra was dynamic throughout, as if challenging each other to greater and greater things.
There were many fine individual moments – a dusky clarinet solo in the second movement, great work from the bassoons and bass clarinet early in the third; and I cannot forbear singling out Antoine Bedewi’s tremendous playing in the crucial and dramatic timpani part. The men of the BBC Symphony Chorus (good to see their Director Neil Ferris among the basses) made a thrilling sound in the Cantico finale – not mysterious and disembodied, like the London Philharmonic Choir in the Albert Hall Gallery, but gleaming darkly like polished rock.
Gerstein has described the concerto as ‘a symphony with piano obbligato’ (which perhaps aligns it, rather incongruously, with Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie). However you view it, it is a glorious one-off: what a privilege it has been to hear two such performances of it at the centenary of Busoni’s death.
Chris Kettle