United Kingdom Brahms, Stravinsky: BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales / Ryan Bancroft (conductor). Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff, 20.6.2025. (PCG)
Brahms – Schicksalslied, Op.54: Serenade No.2 in A minor, Op.16
Stravinsky – Symphony of Psalms, K052
The choral works of Johannes Brahms’s mentor Robert Schumann are slowly beginning to reassert themselves after decades of almost total neglect. Brahms’s choral music, on the other hand, seems to be gradually losing whatever little traction it once had upon the repertory. Only his German Requiem figures with any frequency on modern concert programmes. Even the Alto Rhapsody with its male-choir conclusion is only heard nowadays as an occasional vehicle for established mezzo-sopranos and contraltos, a rare alternative to Mahler, Ravel and Elgar song cycles.
It is hard to see why this should be, except as a reflection of the changing whims of musical fashion. The set of songs for female voices, horns and harp, for instance, are a superb example of Brahms’s vocal writing at its best. The once-popular Song of Destiny is a real rarity now, both in the concert hall and on disc; Brahms did himself no favours by making a full orchestra almost mandatory – to handle the beautiful extended instrumental coda. The cycle was therefore a welcome addition to the programme as a supplement and a contrast to Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. Oddly enough, it was also the only work in the concluding season by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales that actually made use of full symphony orchestral resources.
The programme had commenced with the second of Brahms’s two serenades for orchestra, one of his early quasi-symphonic essays. It dispenses not only with the trumpets and heavy brass but also the violins, leaving the violas to lead the string ensemble. The resulting orchestration has a somewhat sombre tone, but the music itself is essentially lightweight, with four of its five movements in dance rhythms. This lack of Brahmsian symphonic rhetoric has tended to consign the work to the fringes of the repertory – it was almost totally neglected on record until the 1960s – and opportunities to hear it in live performance remain scarce. Ryan Bancroft treated the musical lines with delicacy and poise and did not seek to impose any incongruous drama upon them. His introduction of an unwritten acceleration at points during the final Rondo served principally to point up contrasts when it might be possible for the dance rhythms to become too predictable.
It was only after the interval, with the introduction to the Schicksalslied with its overtones of the second movement of the German Requiem and its ominous timpani triplets, that we were confronted with the real dramatic impetus of the symphonic Brahms. The singing by the BBC National Chorus of Wales was quietly heartfelt and intense. It broke out into a mood of rejoicing during the central section before the quiet relapse into contemplation at the words ‘no abiding place to dwell’ and ‘flung downward to the dark Unknown below’. The final extended orchestral lament was beautifully phrased and delivered here by the orchestral violins relishing their brief moment in the limelight.
It is at moments like these that Brahms the agnostic – as in his German Requiem carefully avoiding any specific reference to Christianity – really connects with modern audiences in a manner that might well have eluded his Victorian contemporaries. This is a magnificent work, and a marvellous discovery of an area of the repertory too long neglected.
By comparison, I felt that Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms had worn relatively less well with the passage of the years. When he wrote it in 1931 – and indeed when I first encountered it in the composer’s CBS recording in the 1960s – the music had a palpable sense of fresh discovery. There is an innovative quality whereby the composer rejuvenated his neo-classical style in the same way that he did his Russian roots in The Rite of Spring twenty years before. The startling discoveries of the Rite had successfully trumped would-be rivals in their many attempts at imitation which followed it. But the similar influence of the Symphony of Psalms (on such wildly diverse composers as Orff, Tippett and Bernstein) has not been similarly kind to their model.
The use of Latin words as an almost abstract rhythmic declaration – originating in Oedipus Rex – was brought to a more triumphantly accessible form by Orff (and Vaughan Williams in the Five Tudor Portraits!) within a few years of the first performance of Stravinsky’s work. The pointillism of the detached chords at the opening got more piquancy by the addition of tuned percussion in Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta within the decade. It seems odd that Stravinsky, with his extensively and extravagantly employed percussion section in his earlier ballets, restricted himself here to timpani and bass drum.
The intricacies of the woodwind counterpoint in the second movement (piccolo and four flutes) were more successfully distilled by Tippett in his interludes in A Child of Our Time, and with greater clarity. Bernstein in his even later Chichester Psalms handled Stravinsky’s abrupt contrasts between fast and slow in the final movement with greater aplomb. He also avoided the sense in the final minutes of the symphony that the whole progress of the music has slowed to an over-extended glacial slowness.
None of this was the fault of the performance, with full-throated choral singing and delicate pointing from the reduced orchestra (no upper strings and percussion) under Bancroft’s enthusiastic direction. The composer may have specified in the score that the chorus should consist of children’s voices, with female choristers only a default option. Yet quite apart from the sheer difficulty of obtaining a satisfactory balance with such forces (in opposition to a very full woodwind and brass contingent), the sheer enthusiasm of the vocal contribution gave a sense of fulfilment to the closing pages with delicate pointing of the closing ‘Alleluia, Laudate Dominum’. It quite gainsaid the composer’s courageously counter-intuitive piano dynamic marking. The score itself might perhaps be said to have dated somewhat over the years; but at moments like this the performance demonstrated that the work still retained a contemporary viability. Bancroft rightly brought the choral director Adrian Partington onstage to share the fervent applause.
It was delightful to be back in the Hoddinott Hall. (I had been unable to attend concerts for some four months following a fall back in February.) I should add that the programme for next season looks particularly enticing, even though the continued closure of St David’s Hall has meant that several of the concerts on a larger scale will not be featured in Cardiff.
The programme under review here is to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 3 July and will be available on BBC Sounds for a further month. And it would be most remiss of me not to remark that the near-capacity size of the enthusiastic audience for a programme which roved quite considerably out of what might be generally regarded as the field of popular repertory. That demonstrated once again an engagement with the arts which are at present under a double attack from hostile and indifferent public funding organisations.
Paul Corfield Godfrey