United Kingdom Bartók, Ravel, Janáček: Robin Tritschler (tenor), Miklós Sebestyén (bass-baritone), Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (piano), BBC Symphony Chorus (director: Neil Ferris), BBC Symphony Orchestra / Dalia Stasevska (conductor). Barbican Hall, London, 12.3.2025. (CK)
Bartók – Cantata Profana
Ravel – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
Janáček – Sinfonietta
Three things drew me to this concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. One was the chance to hear something entirely new to me (Bartók’s Cantata Profana); another was the prospect of enjoying a favourite piece that I have not heard in a long time (Janáček’s Sinfonietta); and the third was the opportunity to see and hear a conductor I have not seen before: the Finnish – though Ukrainian-born – Dalia Stasevska.
Dynamic, charismatic – the promotional material doesn’t exaggerate – she is both of those. She also exudes a natural warmth that is contagious both for the players in front of her and the audience behind her. The only thing she appears to lack is the vanity that so often, in her profession, seems to go hand in hand with charisma.
As its title suggests, Bartók’s Cantata is stripped of its Christian resonances (Janáček would surely have approved) to tell a magical tale of a huntsman whose nine sons are transformed into stags. The father hunts them and is about to shoot when the eldest speaks to him: there is no way back from the strangeness of nature to the mundanity of being human (their antlers, he tells the father, will not fit through his doorway).
Mysterious stirrings in the strings and woodwind lead to a magical choral entry that grows into a glowing chord-cluster before giving way to brisk, incisive narrative. The section describing the hunt was outstandingly vivid, featuring the most exciting choral singing I have heard since the Prague Philharmonic Choir in Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass at last summer’s BBC Proms. The moment of transformation on the bridge was eerily evoked by harp and gong. Tenor Robin Tritschler coped well with the high-lying music of the eldest son, sounding suitably otherworldly; bass-baritone Miklós Sebestyén was correspondingly moving as the earthbound father.
It is a potent tale; Bartók’s treatment of it combines raw immediacy with haunting strangeness, and both qualities were projected with maximum vividness by players and singers alike. Stasevska had to do some hunting of her own to prise Neil Ferris, the director of the BBC Symphony Chorus, from his seat in the audience to share in the well-deserved reception.
I could run out of superlatives about the performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand that followed. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is of course peerless in this repertoire, though I was not expecting the dark, scintillating brilliance of his playing to carry such a powerful emotional charge: in both the dramatic and the lyrical passages he held us in the palm of his (left) hand.
Stasevska matched him in her energy, her precision and her palpable joy in the music. When the jazzy theme burst onto the scene there was wonderful interplay between soloist and orchestra – piano trills echoed by the horns; sparkling flutes and piccolo; solo bassoon, trombone and woodblock bringing the recently-composed Bolero within hailing distance. Stasevska whipped up the orchestra to such a pitch that Bavouzet almost disappeared for a few bars: after his cadenza – again, full of feeling as well as brilliance – the ending was, quite simply, sensational. I marvelled afresh that Paul Wittgenstein, who commissioned the work, turned up his nose at it and would only play it in a version altered to suit himself. Bavouzet’s right hand joined the party for his encore, Ravel’s Prelude and Toccata.
Twenty-six brass instruments were onstage for Janáček’s Sinfonietta, half of them standing in a row above the orchestra (nine trumpets, two bass trumpets, two euphoniums). The brass playing was immaculate and thrilling, but this fine performance also highlighted Janáček’s superbly characteristic writing for the rest of the orchestra.
Stasevska ensured that tension never slackened. There was no question of sitting back and waiting for the twelve trumpets to crash into the finale. Each movement seemed almost bursting with sharply-etched intensity and character; yet when we got there Stasevska and the players had more in the tank. It was, for me, a performance to set beside that of the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall in 1994. Of that performance I felt the rightness of Gerhart von Westerman’s words (in his Concert Guide, my vade mecum when I was feeling my way into classical music): ‘The extraordinary hymn-like sound is very affecting; behind all the external opulence one feels the presence of simple goodness and honesty.’
This concert was one of the shortest in my experience – just an hour of music – but it was also unusually substantial and satisfying. After these glittering performances of three early twentieth-century masterpieces I would be surprised if anyone left the hall feeling short-changed.
Chris Kettle