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Concert
Saturday, 3 October 2009.
19:30
Barbican Hall, London
Gerald Finley
Jiří Bĕlohlávek, conductor
BBC Symphony Orchestra
WA Mozart: Symphony No 29 in A major, K201
Gustav Mahler: Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Gerry's first performance of them)
Das Irdische Leben (Earthly Life)
Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fish)
Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (Where the fine trumpets sound)
Lob des hohen Verstandes (In Praise of High Intellect)
Modest Musorgsky: Songs and Dances of Death
Lullaby
Serenade
Trepak
The Field Marshall
Bohuslav Martinů: Symphony No 1
Bohuslav Martinů invested rich personal experience in his First Symphony, a work conceived in exile from Nazi-dominated Europe. Fifty years after the composer’s death, his fellow Czech and leading interpreter Jiří Bĕlohlávek opens the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s season with the first concert in a series devoted to the composer’s six symphonies. The Orchestra’s Chief Conductor is joined by the outstanding bass-baritone Gerald Finley in two essential works by Mahler and Musorgsky.
Click here to read a transcription of Gerry being interviewed about this concert for the broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
What the critics say
Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph, 5 Oct 2009
Bass-baritone Gerard Finley was a rock-solid presence at the BBC Symphony Orchestra's concert at the Barbican.
Last Saturday, just three weeks after its gruelling two-month stint as the Proms “house orchestra” came to an end, the BBC Symphony Orchestra launched its new season at the Barbican. There are good things in store, such as the three day-long tributes to living composers, a commission from jazz giants Bill Frisell and Mike Gibbs, and a cycle of five symphonies by that restive, volcanically expressive Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu.
The first of these formed the climax of this opening concert, and its life-affirming energy made a perfect foil to Musorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, with their grim celebration of death’s all-conquering power.
And these followed on very naturally from the folk wisdom of Mahler’s song-cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn, where at one point death also intrudes on a homely scene.
A rich programme, which would have made a very satisfying whole. So why was Mozart’s 29th Symphony tacked on at the front? It was too long to be a curtain-raiser, and its Rococo brightness was too slender to make sense in this company. In any case the orchestra seemed to be playing it on auto-pilot. The Mahler songs are just as finely calibrated in their sonorities as the Mozart, and here, too, the orchestra seemed willing in spirit but uncertain in execution.
Fortunately we had the rock-solid presence of bass-baritone Gerard Finley. Quite a few singers catch the stark mood of the tragic songs in Mahler’s song-cycle, but fewer can sing the song about St Anthony preaching to the fish without sounding coy. Finley can do both, with ease. In Musorgsky’s heart-breaking song about a mother trying to push Death away from her sick child, he could turn from pleading tenderness to implacable will with no sense of strain.
Then it was time for Martinu’s 1st Symphony, and here the orchestra came to life. The opening, where rising lines unfurl through a glowing chord – like a ripple passing through a reflected sunrise – was perfectly realised. Many things jostle for space in this symphony – jazz, pert neo-classicism, and a Czech-flavoured romantic effusiveness – and I have yet to encounter a performance that makes everything cohere. But this thrilling and heartfelt one came close.
Erica Jeal, The Guardian, 6 October 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/06/bbcso-belohlavek-barbican-review
Rating: Four out of five stars
There is something cheering about discovering Bohuslav Martinu's music, and about finding an imagination so quirkily yet lyrically buoyant. What's not cheering is the half-hearted way in which his 50-year anniversary has been marked by our major orchestras. Leading the otherwise reluctant field is the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their Czech chief, Jiˇrí Bˇelohlávek, who brought us the opera Juliette in March, and, here, a survey of Martinu's six symphonies began with the First, composed in US exile in 1942.
Half a century earlier, another Czech stranded in the States had spun his homesickness into his music; however, Martinu's is a brave new world symphony, teeming with magical, mysterious effects and Czech idioms rendered in glorious Technicolor. The introduction, long chords transmuting via intoxicating woodwind swirls, could be the soundtrack for Dorothy telling Toto they are not in Silesia any more.
Perhaps Bˇelohlávek kept the second movement a little too controlled, but the slow third found him in his element, shaping long crescendos, and the folk rhythms of the finale set feet twitching and the wind players' heads dancing.
Mozart's A major Symphony No 29 was a slightly incongruous opener in context, though its finale went with a boisterous swing. The two orchestral song selections were a better foil. Gerald Finley lavished his smooth baritone on four songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the lighter ones especially well judged. He was even better in Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, wheedling his way to his victims with convincingly Russian vocal heft and killer charm.
Colin Anderson, Classicalsource.com
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=7483
The BBC Symphony Orchestra opened its season – which will include Jiří Bělohlávek conducting all six of Bohuslav Martinů’s symphonies – with a one-dimensional Mozart 29, any disappointment then wiped away by Gerald Finley, quite outstanding in Mahler and Mussorgsky.
Rarely has this particular Mozart symphony seemed so ebullient, but there was little grace and elegance as Bělohlávek harried the first movement along, disregarding so many expressive opportunities, the playing, especially in the strings, not the last word on good ensemble or unanimity, a blight that would return in the Minuet, given with rigour if little else. The slow movement was quite lovingly turned, but we never quite reached the Elysian Fields, and only the finale fully responded to the conductor’s virile approach.
The rest of the concert was where rehearsal time had been lavishly spent; the first selection from the Mahler was immediate evidence, precise and detailed playing, absolutely at-one with Gerald Finley, the singer in commanding and communicative form, savouring every word, and as sublimely beautiful, evocative and witty as you could want, the melange of winds (Angela Whelan a distinguished guest principal trumpet) acting as notable confreres in ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ when, come the final words, a distant battle is about to be fought (but timpani were too-audibly hand-damped, almost second notes, in ‘Lob des hohen Verstandes’, and would be as-noticeable in the Martinů).
After the interval, Finley – a Gramophone Award-winner the day before – also illuminated Mussorgsky’s “Songs and Dances of Death” to compelling (and linguistically masterly) effect, Shostakovich’s 1962 orchestration as revealing of himself as it is complementary to Mussorgsky (music that is forward-looking, breaks the rules, yet also belongs to his contemporaries Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky). Arguably, these settings needs a ‘blacker’ voice than Finley possesses (both for the music and for the Russian language), but time and again – as in the Mahler – his unaffected (smooth but never bland) phrasing and his ability to be vivid while remaining intrinsic caught unerringly the music’s pathos, torment, eerie enchantment and raging, the sardonic dance measures (orchestra) and declamation (voice) of the last song a perfect encapsulation of the insights and devotion of the whole performance.
Nevertheless, it was Martinů who stole the show. Fifty years dead this year, this Czech-born (1890) if nomadic artist remains too-peripheral a composer to the general repertoire. He took many years to write his first symphony (partly because he had a “lifelong horror of all forms of pretension and pomposity”). Already through his 50th-birthday, it was in 1942 that Martinů (now in the States, having been in Paris) received a commission for a symphony from Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He composed the four-movement, 40-minute Symphony No.1 quickly, and the symphonic floodgates were then opened: there would be five further symphonies in rapid succession, culminating in 1953 with Fantaisies symphoniques (a full-circle return to Boston, now with Charles Munch).
Put simply, the First Symphony is a terrific piece (not quite a masterpiece, the finale is maybe too long and too discursive), but it is loveable, kaleidoscopic and deeply-felt, the clusters of colours launching the first movement resembling the opening of an exotic flower, the music pulsating with life (and inner tension) as well as being tenderly nostalgic and heartfelt, something of a prelude, fantasy and symphonic logic in symbiosis, followed by a gawky, flamboyant scherzo, Martinů’s rhythmic mechanisms in full flow.
At the core of the symphony is the third-movement Largo, given an appropriately expansive pace by Bělohlávek, its soul-stirring depths rising to troubled heights. It’s no doubt coincidence (or simply through breathing the same American air) that occasionally the ear detects a touch of Roy Harris in ground he had already travelled (his Third Symphony of course), but in the finale, Martinů seems to anticipate the Aaron Copland of The Red Pony (1948). But these are incidental details, for one could also cite the orchestral virtuosity of William Walton (and all these named composers are from the same milieu), so that the spiky, sometimes playful finale, with an eloquent chorale that seems a little out of place structurally (but you couldn’t do without it emotionally), all lead to a wholly personal exhilarating and joyous coda.
It would be difficult to imagine a performance that could be more faithfully and perceptively conducted than this one or more responsively played; this BBCSO/Bělohlávek Martinů symphony-cycle promises to be something really special.
Anna Picard, The Independent, 11 October 2009
The long, wry face of Bohuslav Martinu gives little away. Posed for a studio portrait, cigarette clamped between his fingers, standing to the side of a concert poster in Boston or strolling through Central Park, here is a quiet man from a small, distant country.
Neither a forgotten genius nor an also-ran, he is a hard sell: fluent in several musical languages, yet somehow voiceless. Forgivable then, if regrettable, that instead of using their six-concert cycle of Martinu's symphonies to provide a context for this Czech chameleon – programming works by Pavel Haas, Erwin Schulhoff, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krasa or Martinu's pupil and lover, Vitezslava Kapralova – Jiri Belohlavek and the BBC Symphony Orchestra launched their Barbican series with three other composers whose names begin with M.
Are there hints of Mozart, Mahler or Mussorgsky in Martinu's First Symphony? No. Premiered in Boston in 1942, the symphony sounds exactly as it is: a work by an experienced Czech composer writing for a large American orchestra. Rarely is there a phrase without some "added value", be it the skittering of a harp in high register, or the sparkle of a cymbal, like the nervous flourish of a chef who cannot serve a salad without garnishing it with a slice of orange and a snipping of chives. Yet the writing is undeniably polished and attractive. Moravian dance rhythms jostle with the melancholy flutterings of water and wood nymphs, ancient subjects distorted through the crazy-mirror sonorities of Expressionism and the smart syncopations of Broadway.
Big-bosomed, vampish melodies for horn and long-legged oboe solos cede to hazy, pastoral string writing, while snare drums signal Czech resolve under Nazi occupation. There's sorrow here – most evident in Belohlavek's meticulous sculpting of the Largo – and nostalgia too. But tempting as the parallels are between this and Dvorak's Ninth Symphony, Martinu, who had left Prague back in 1923, was suffering from something more complex than the homesickness that dogged his forebear in America. By the time his symphony was premiered, Kapralova, who had conducted the BBC Orchestra in 1938, and Schulhoff were dead, while Haas, Krasa and Ullmann had been interned in Theresienstadt. By the end of the war, Martinu would be the only leading Czech composer of his generation left alive.
Those anxious to hear the music of Martinu's contemporaries will have to search elsewhere. In the meantime, one has to hope that the insurance policy pieces in the BBCSO's performances of his Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies (the Second was given this Friday) are better rehearsed than those here. Gerald Finley sang four songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn with unusual delicacy and restraint, saving himself for the tar-boiling malevolence of Shostakovich's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. Michael Cox's sensitively shaded flute playing was a welcome distraction from the diffident strings, whose lacklustre sound and scruffy entries of Mozart's Symphony No 29 indicated they might need m-m-more than two weeks' holiday after the Proms.