City Halls, Glasgow
In the not-so-distant past, when Robert Schumann’s music was less often performed, the idea that his Second Symphony could emerge as comfort food at the end of a long programme would have seemed strange, yet that was almost what happened here.
That is not to say that there was anything amiss with Ryan Wiggleworth’s reading of the work. On the contrary, this Schumann 2 was the closing highlight of a lengthy programme that ranged over almost two centuries of music with the meat in the middle of the sandwich some chewy tasty stuff. Whether the bill of fare made sense as a concert menu is another question altogether.
That filling featured the guest soloist, tenor Mark Padmore, and there are precious few singers capable of serving it as effectively as he did. Arguably that includes the one for whom both works were written, Peter Pears, whose voice is not to every taste.
Padmore’s instrument is much easier to warm to and perhaps more technically secure. He dealt with the daunting intervals in the music of Benjamin Britten’s Nocturne of 1958, setting well-known English poets likely found in an anthology of verse, with deceptive ease. The vocal line is always challenging and, perversely, some of the most likeable music is given to the singer’s duet partners in the wind ensemble, although it is no less virtuosic.
After the interval, Padmore returned to sing the work’s close kin, Lutoslawski’s Paroles tissées, commissioned by Britten for Pears to sing at the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival. It calls for fewer strings, with and harp and piano in the partnership roles, and is a fascinating piece, both for the choice of Jean-Francois Chabrun’s contemporary French poetry and the way the Polish composer treats the language as an element of the music.
Its “Troisieme Tapisserie” fills a parallel role to Britten’s pivotal use of a section of Wordsworth’s Prelude in Nocturne, as Padmore’s declamatory delivery made explicitly clear, and this was a revealing opportunity to listen to both works together.
Something similar was obviously the idea behind bracketing those performances between symphonies by Mozart and Schumann that share the key of C Major and catch the composers at a period of transition. It was a perilous one for Schumann, his consciousness of his frail mental state balanced by palpable (if sadly misplaced) optimism about the future.
Wigglesworth, conducting without a score, was at his most relaxed in what turned out to be a terrific account of the symphony. The second movement Scherzo sparkled, the trap of wallowing in the slow movement – which cannot really stand being treated like Barber’s Adagio or Mahler’s Adagietto – was evaded, and there was a real grandeur about the finale.
Mozart’s 34th Symphony, written in Salzburg, post-Paris and pre-Vienna, opened the concert and fared less well. While it is a return to scale after the intimacy of its Haydn-like predecessor, this performance lacked a lightness of touch. It might have been preferable, in fact, to hear it with just the 14 violins the orchestra reduced to for the Britten that followed. The central slow movement seemed like an interruption to the work’s train of thought, and although both outer movements are marked “Allegro vivace”, a real sense of dramatic liveliness only appeared in the finale.
Keith Bruce
Concert repeated at Perth Concert Hall tonight. This performance was broadcast on Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds.
Portrait of Mark Padmore by Marco Borggreve