United Kingdom Johann Strauss II, Berg, Brahms: Alena Baeva (violin), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra / Mark Wigglesworth (conductor). Lighthouse, Poole, 22.1.2025. (CK)
Johann Strauss II – The Blue Danube
Berg – Violin Concerto
Brahms – Symphony No.2
It was good to be back in the Lighthouse with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra; though three weeks into a cold January, with Storm Eowyn imminent, it already felt rather retro to be listening to Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube (Prosit Neues Jahr and all that). Still, it was a lovely curtain-raiser, Mark Wigglesworth easing his players into those immortal melodies, whipping up excitement when it was needed; and it provided heartening evidence – even more than Wagner’s Mastersingers Overture last November – that conductor and orchestra are understanding, and liking, each other rather well.
The concert was titled Viennese Whirls; though with Berg and Brahms providing the substantial fare Carinthian Capers might have done just as well. Too frivolous for these profound works, I know, but it is interesting that geographically they are close neighbours – both were written in their composers’ country retreats, a short distance apart on the shores of the Wörthersee in Carinthia (temporally, they are over half a century apart). When I visited Berg’s house his car was still in the garage: the curator recalled taking Claudio Abbado and Zubin Mehta for a spin in it while they were studying in Vienna.
Alena Baeva, in a gold, Grecian-style dress, looked – entirely appropriately – as if she had stepped out of a Klimt painting. Having last heard the Berg Violin Concerto in a performance that was all shredded nerve-ends and existential despair (I exaggerate), it was lovely to hear her thoughtful and beautiful account, a little demure and underpowered in the more dramatic episodes of the second movement – partly a matter of balance with the orchestra – but finding the radiance which the work’s later, Bach-inspired stretches demand. It was also a continuous pleasure to enjoy Berg’s orchestration, so clearly laid out by players and conductor; the important percussion parts, for example, were sensitively handled throughout, and the contributions of the horns and woodwind (and, indeed, the strings) were finely and often delicately made. The Bach chorale, in the gentle hands of the quartet of clarinets, was ineffable.
There is much intensity, heartache and heartbreak locked into this piece – the death of young Manon Gropius, Berg’s complex relationships with women, from the kitchen maid who bore him a child at seventeen to his long adulterous affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, and the growing sense that it is his own requiem; yet when the music starts – at least, in a performance as natural as this – it is its own testament, needing no explanation of the twelve-tone system, number symbolism or anything else. The music’s successive moods – capricious, harrowing, reflective and so on – took their places in a beguiling musical journey that ended, rather as Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde does, in an evaporation into the wide blue yonder. Baeva’s performance was warmly – more than that, almost ecstatically – received: she is this season’s BSO Artist-in-Residence, and the partnership is paying dividends.
After the interval we were afforded the luxury – for so it is, in a cold January – of basking for forty minutes in Carinthian sunshine. This performance of Brahms’s Second Symphony was suffused with the same qualities that had endeared Johann Strauss and Berg to us: it sounded entirely natural, organic, never hurried. It was interesting to see how Wigglesworth (conducting from memory) went about creating the Brahms sound – swaying a little in sympathy with the music, moulding phrases economically with hands and arms: and a wonderfully homogeneous, glowing, unsensational Brahms sound is what we got. Of course there was excitement – the ending of the finale was as thrilling as it should be – but the graceful and undemonstrative oneness of orchestra and conductor, of conception and execution, was one of the chief joys of the performance. The principal horn and her whole section deserved their bow, and it was entirely right that the cellos were brought to their feet before the full strings: but this was a collective achievement. I am looking forward to this partnership’s next concert in a few weeks’ time: an intriguing programme, including another Brahms symphony.
Chris Kettle