Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

More Proms

When the Orchestra of St. Luke's and Donald Runnicles were done in by what might be called increased security regulations and were not able do get to the UK to do their Proms concert on August 17, The City of London Sinfonia and Paul Daniel were able to step in. They did the scheduled program: Stravinsky Dumbarton Oaks, Lutoslawski Paroles tissees, Wagner Siegfried Idyll, and Mozart Jupiter Symphony. Dumbarton Oaks got a performance that was, as it should be, both ebullient and incisive. The Lutoslawski, for tenor with an orchestra of strings, piano, harp, and percussion, is a setting of a poem by Jean-Francois Chabrun, written in 1965 for Peter Pears. The title means Woven Words, and is described as Four Tapestries for the Chatelaine of Vergy, the main character of a medieval French romance; the poems literally weaves images back and forth among its four sections. The music doesn't seem to try for the same sort of cross-referencing, but certainly aims at presenting the words and the singer clearly and making them the reference point for the structure of the piece. I had never heard this piece before, and I was pretty completely overwhelmed; as far as I'm concerned it's really a great piece (capital G, capital P). The performance by Ian Bostridge was magisterial.

The concert on August 18 featured the London Symphony conducted by Valery Gergiev. Shostakovich, by virtue of his centennial, is one of the featured composer of the Proms this year, and this concert included a number of excerpts from The Golden Age. I was, for some reason, a little sad that the Polka wasn't one of them. One thing this music makes clear is that a number of the characteristics of Shostakovich's later music which one tends to associate with his reaction to having been badly battered (to say the least) by life and the state were elements of his language to begin with. The Golden Age is extremely accomplished--especially in the entr'acte which is a version of Tea for Two (intellectual property was theft, apparently)--but mostly sort of unpleasant, if not downright repellent. Yuri Bashmet joined them for a performance of the Schnittke Viola Concerto, a big and impressive piece in three relentless movements which do most of the things that Schnittke pieces do, and
do them pretty well. It's almost unbearably dark and desparing, making Shostkovich seem like a smurf by comparison. The performance could hardly have given more of a sense of having been definitive.

Two days later, Gergiev returned (well, he'd really never left, since he also conducted the concert on the 19th), with soloists, the chorus and the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatrek in tow, to perform the original version of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsenk District. The opera, of course, is famous for being the excuse for the first big drubbing that Shostakovich received at the hands of Stalin's government, but it's music is not really terribly well known--by me, anyway; I'd never heard it. It's a big, sprawling, copletely masterly, wildly imaginative, impressive thing--aiming to be a real crowd pleaser, and maybe like The Magic Flute, for instance, to accomplish that by having a little something of everything. It's maybe not surprising, then, that it isn't completely consistently successful (also like the Magic Flute). The first half, particularly the second act is absolutely edge of the seat, nail-biting compelling. The second half is a little slacker dramatically. There's a big sort of Gilbert and Sullivan number with the police, who are presented as Key Stone Cops, but malicious as well as completely incompetent. It's very funny and pretty great, but it's sylistically incongruous and more than a little distracting to the progress of things. Katerina, the Lady Macbeth, has lots and lots of very beautiful music, particularly a big aria in the first act and another, mostly accomplanied only by English Horn, in the last, and Larisa Gogolevskaya made a meal of it, as did everybody else involved, both singers and players.

It can't be said often enough, since it's such a good thing, that all of the Proms can be listened to on line for a week after they're broadcast, so you can check these out at www.bbc.co.uk/proms/.

Yet more to come...

posted by Rodney Lister 8/25/2006