Tag Archives: Alban Gerhardt

BBC SSO: Wigglesworth / Gerhardt

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City Halls, Glasgow

Cross-connections played a part in making sense of Thursday’s matinee programme by the BBC SSO under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. Take Shakespeare for a start. Thea Musgrave’s brief concert piece, Aurora, extracts its titular inspiration from a mention in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while Elgar’s symphonic study Falstaff hones in on that eponymous rogue’s mixed fortunes in the Henry plays. Mention of A Midsummer Night’s Dream reminds us of Benjamin Britten, whose substantial Cello Symphony and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra closed both concert halves respectively. Thus a tenuous tangled web was woven.

In the end, though, it was the conflicting essence of the programme’s components that created a sense of unity-in-diversity, a journey of incongruous stop-offs. That said, there was more than a whiff of Brittenesque imagery in Musgrave’s Aurora – a hugely self-contented work written in 1999 by the Scots-born composer, now two years short of her 100th birthday, for the awakening minds of Los Angeles’ Colburn School of Performing Arts students – that gave it context as an appetiser to Britten’s Cello Symphony.

This was the softer, less clinically acerbic side to Musgrave, a ravishing viola solo (movingly introduced by principal violist Andrew Berridge) giving rise to an enchanting reverie that also featured prominent solos by leader Emma Steele and lead cellist Rudi de Groote. The full ensemble caressed the music, its rise and fall exquisitely measured, its single-note ending profound in its simplicity. Once or twice the detailed textures seemed to slacken in purpose, but only momentarily. 

It was therefore an easy step from that scene-setter to Britten’s 1963 masterpiece, the substantial Cello Symphony written originally for Rostropovich and performed here by German cellist Alban Gerhardt. This orchestra and soloist were no strangers to the concerto, having collaborated in a recording under Andrew Manze in this very hall back in 2013. 

Self-assured authority made its presence felt instantly, Gerhardt responding to the amorphous lower strings with growing belligerence, the intensity escalating before the opening movement’s exhaustive final breath. The ensuing Scherzo released a frenzy of nervy hyperactivity before the dark entanglements of the Adagio, the complex introversion of Gerhardt’s cadenza (partly in fiery combination with Gordon Rigby’s timpani), and a finale touching on the burlesque and resolving in splendour and resolve. Wigglesworth captained a mostly impressive SSO display.

Elgar’s Falstaff rarely sees the light of day, which seems perplexing in a performance that so effectively captured the multi-faceted persona of the enigmatic hero, yet at the same time reflected Elgar’s insistence that “Falstaff is the name, but Shakespeare – the whole of human life – is the theme”. For there is a universal spirit to this music that is forever Elgar – a complexity of pompous themes, chattering humour and aching sentimentality – and that is what Wigglesworth and an expansive SSO observed.

From arrogance to debauchery, drunkenness to practical jokiness, sentimentalist to banished fool, the musical outcome was riveting. The SSO responded with tingling virtuosity, from gushing warmth and heraldic grandeur to febrile vivacity. As such, though possibly by accident, it was the perfect preparation for the more clinical orchestral dissection of Britten’s Young Person’s Guide. In what was veering towards an overlong concert, the masterful succinctness and sheer dexterity of Britten’s musical ingenuity secured a refreshing finale. And, unlike the Elgar, one that ended on a high note.

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in Concert, after which it will be available via BBC Sounds for 30 days

BBC SSO / Aldeburgh Festival

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Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk

While some festivals around the UK have modelled themselves on the Aldeburgh Festival – marriages of off-the-beaten-track location, top-level programming and the kudos of having a major composer as its central icon – none can quite match the idyllic campus-style infrastructure of this 75-year-old Suffolk event, founded by the late Benjamin Britten and now part of a wider musical initiative – performance, coaching and research – that extends throughout the year. 

Last week the 800-seater concert hall at the heart of the swiftly remodelled Snape Maltings complex played host to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, signing off for its summer holidays with two magnificent programmes under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. 

Getting there wasn’t all plain sailing. A cancelled Avanti Glasgow-to-London train left a majorly extended orchestra jostling for seats on a later service, consequently missing their planned Ipswich connection and having to purchase new tickets as a result. Not that it showed the following evening in a challenging opening programme of music by Judith Weir, Britten and Mahler.

Not even in the second half, when the alarming announcement was made that second oboist Mary James had suffered a serious accident – catching her fingers in a heavy metal door during the interval and requiring hospital treatment – and that between them principal oboist Alexandra Hilton and cor anglais player James Horan would “cover the missing notes” in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which they did with astonishing skill. 

Indeed, the Mahler turned out to be the highpoint of the evening, Wigglesworth considerably more relaxed with his orchestra than in recent months, stepping back from the fray to allow plentiful breathing space in a piece that lives by its spontaneous gestures, teasing hiatuses and poetic flavourings. 

Between the playful charm of the opening movement and easeful bliss of the finale, the scherzo bristled with folk-like devilment (guest leader Roberto Ruisi’s tantalising violin solos) while the adagio’s ultimate transcendence becalmed its anguished undercurrents. Soprano Elizabeth Watts’ emergence in the final movement possessed that magical childlike fusion of fear and innocence. Most of all, there was penetrating clarity throughout this performance, the SSO sensitive to the subtleties and hitting the climaxes with sparkling elan.

We could have done with more of that in Judith Weir’s Forest, which she describes as “a modern tone poem” characterised by ever-shifting moods and colours. While the former were explicit in Wigglesworth’s free-flowing vision, there was something indistinct about the textural detail, even in this hall’s crystalline acoustics, a clear sense that keener shading between instrumental colourings might have sharpened the presentation. Was the simple Brittenesque opening not an obvious clue?

There were frustrating tendencies, too, in soloist Daniel Pioro’s account of Britten’s pre-World War II Violin Concerto. The positivity in his performance was for the most part stimulating, particularly in the blustery Scherzo, but where Pioro’s playing strayed into more roughshod territory the true spirit of the piece – even its underlying whiffs of foreboding – seemed to evaporate. 

Thursday’s second SSO concert was altogether more consistent, featuring two brilliantly contrasted works: Unsuk Chin’s electrifying concerto followed by the towering grandeur of Bruckner’s Symphony No 7.

Central to the Chin was soloist Alban Gerhardt, whose performance was a triumph of the seemingly impossible. This went way beyond mere virtuosity. Gerhardt’s gymnastic fingering, his precision tuning even where the South Korean composer prescribes notes off the diatonic grid, the sheer explosive depth of his tone production, all contributed to a mesmerising display of exceptional musicianship. 

Even when he burst a string mid-concerto there was no let-up. Gerhardt snatched SSO principal cello Rudi de Groote’s cello, setting off a chain reaction of instrument exchanges among the section before the orchestra picked up again from where it left off. Far from killing the enjoyment, this moment of danger simply raised the entertainment stakes in a performance excitable for its organic inevitability, charismatic delivery and breathtaking showmanship.

The Bruckner proved the perfect foil, a symphony that Wigglesworth and his orchestra performed several weeks ago in Scotland, but which here, in the lively Snape acoustics, seemed so much riper, more purposefully driven, more wholesome and convincing in its reasoning. The strings possessed a ravishing fullness, the wind and brass equal in richness. 

It was forceful without the bombast, a feast of meaty colours and powerful emotion, a monstrous but stimulating edifice. Stepping out into the Suffolk countryside in the dimming midsummer light, with the River Alde meandering through the swaying reed beds, offered a welcome relaxant. A magical place.

Ken Walton

Both concerts were broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and are now available on BBC Sounds

SCO / Schuldt

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SCO / Schuldt

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Getting the best out of Schumann is not as easy as one might imagine. There’s something about his orchestral music in particular that tells of an ardent and instinctive creative mind working hard to express the fullness of its fruits, but where an overabundance of his own self-criticism looms menacingly, threatening to suffocate its natural flow. Get the right conductor, and the threats dissolve. Clement Schuldt is one such exponent, something he proved beyond doubt in an SCO programme that began and ended with Schumann.

It was in the final work, the Symphony No 3 known as the Rhenish, that the distinctive character of Schuldt’s approach was most forcibly illustrated. He is a gestural conductor, who paints vivid pictures with his hands and which an orchestra as responsive as the SCO latches onto with stimulating results. 

This was by no means a pristine run-of-the-mill Rhenish, in that a certain riskiness gave this performance ample biting edge and spontaneous thrills. Dubiety of pulse in the opening bars instilled an unsettlingly mystifying ambiguity, resolving quickly to assert the extremes of pomposity and brooding melancholy that frame the first movement’s stormy polemic. 

The moderately-paced Scherzo was both weighty and fluid; the third movement meaty and mellifluous; the final two moments sombre and vivacious respectively. Informing all of this was a richly-flavoured SCO – its bold winds, punchy brass and brazen strings emphasised in the immediacy of the Queen’s Hall acoustics.

Compare that to the Scottish premiere of Julian Anderson’s Cello Concerto “Litanies” which preceded it, its shimmery impermanence a million miles from the gravitational solidity of the Schumann. Performed superbly by Alban Gerhardt, its dedicatee, Anderson’s originality sat to the fore, lacy textures bearing an almost ephemeral appeal and exhilaration, Gerhardt fully absorbed in the music’s translucent charm, sympathetic to the ingenuity of orchestral flavourings punching the air around him. 

The work which opening the concert – Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale – presented the composer in uncommonly high spirits, reflected by Schuldt’s vibrant, cheery realisation. It was a performance that danced on air, oozed theatricality and languished in heart-felt lyricism. Yet it resisted any temptation for anodyne complacency, Schuldt’s vigorous precision keeping it fresh and dynamic at every turn.

Ken Walton