Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

A Few More Proms

On August 22 H K Gruber, the BBC Singers, and the BBC Symphony did a late night Prom featuring music by Gruber, Eisler, and Weill. The concert opened with a Gruber piece , Hidden Agenda, which had received its first performance two days earlier on a concert by the same people in Switzerland. Hidden Agenda is based on the famous "twelve tone row" from the development section of the Mozart g minor Symphony. It has the feel of being some sort of chaconne in that there seems to be a regular periodicity about it. At the same time it gradually and inexorably gets faster and louder (presumably through some kind of isorhythmic process), going right to the very end, without any kind of pauses, cadences, or other punctuation along the way. In fact every musical component is deployed in the service of the furtherance of that design. One always has the sense of moving towards somewhere, but the instant that one gets there, everything's over. The effect is compelling, but ultimately not completely satisfying, however appealing and skillful everything is every step of the way.

Five of the six short pieces by Eisler and Weill dated from right around 1930 and were products of their collaboration with Bertold Brecht, although none of them were theater pieces. All of them were extremely well done and suitably rousing in various ways. I found Uber Das Toten, Op. 21, No. 2, Eisler's setting of Brecht's commentary on the idea of a war to end war, to be the most effective. These five were preceeded by Weill's Kiddush, which was commissioned in 1946 by the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. Its Hebrew text was set in Weill's best Broadway style.

The concert ended with a performance of Gruber's Frankenstein!!, in a version for full orchestra rather than the smaller instrumentation, which is the only one I knew existed, and with Gruber as both conductor and chansonnier. The larger version seems to me to be much more colorfully orchestrated and much more effective than the other version--at least in other performances that I'd heard. It may just be that Gruber makes any performance which involves him vivid and lively. In any case conducting and performing the voice part simulataneously was an impressive feat. As entertaining as Frankenstein!! is, even in this performance, I would be happy if there were about ten minutes less of it.

Mark Anthony Turnage's A Relic of Memory is an expanded version of Calmo, a short piece for chorus, desk bells, and organ which he wrote in 2004 in memory of Sue Knussen. This piece sets parts of Shakespeare's Sonnet 71 and tiny bit of the Dies Irae (the words "Lacrimosa dies illa") in addition to the text of Calmo, which is the words "give us peace" in a number of languages. The music that was Calmo is, in fact, the end of this piece; it is now preceded by an a cappella setting of the Shakespeare with orchestral outbursts, and an increasingly thicker and louder texture leading up to it, the whole lasting about 17 minutes. I can't say that it made much of an impression on me. The Bells by Rakmaninov, which ended the concert, made a fiarly negative one, though; I would be very happy never to hear it again. I guess I wouldn't mind hearing the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto, which was between them, again--just not for a good long while.

Sculpture, by Magnus Lindberg is a really wonderful piece. One the works commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to celebrate the opening of Walt Disney Hall, it received its first UK performance on August 25 from Jukka-Pekka Sarasate and the BBC Symphony. The most immediately noticeable aspect of the piece is the richness and fullness of its sonority; this is partially a function of aspects of the scoring of the piece: no violins, and pairs of pianos, harps, bass clarinets, and contrabassoons, but it's really mainly a result of Lindberg's mastery of orchestration and his ability to write gratefully for instruments and get the most beautiful possible sounds from them. In the third section of the piece, a mosiac of bits of music for various smaller ensembles, the virtuosity of the writing (and the orchestra's playing) is focused on the indidual rather than the aggregate. Apparently Lindberg was participating as pianist and conductor in performances of Les noces while he was writing Sculpture, and the influence of Stravinsky is clear. It's an invigorating and, one might say, thrilling piece.

That afternoon, a short performer portrait concert, Lindberg played his Piano Jubilees and Sarah Thurlow and Sarah Suckling, from the Contemporary Consort of the Royal College of Music, played Steamboat Bill, Jr. a frenetically active piece for clarinet and 'cello. They were both high grade pieces, but neither quite on the level of Sculpture.

All of this can be heard for a while on the Proms website: ww.w.bbc.co.uk/proms/

posted by Rodney Lister 8/29/2006