Brahms, Rachmaninov, Vaughan Williams, Elgar: James Gilchrist (tenor), Sunwook Kim (piano), BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Tadaaki Otaka (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff  14.9.2007 (GPu)

 

A new season by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales got off to an impressive start with a programme of Romantic orchestral works, well directed by the orchestra’s Conductor Laureate Tadaaki Otaka, much appreciated by a slightly less than full-capacity audience.

Having been involved in the university environment for more than forty years, I have long felt that Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture contains one of the more outrageously oxymoronic titles in music history. Festivity and the academic world, in my experience, exist at opposite poles – but Brahms’s engaging piece does a fair bit to overcome the great divide. It is ‘academic’ both in its occasion (it was written on the award of a doctorate to Brahms by the University of Breslau) and in the ‘correctness’ of its structure (a loosely conceived but beautifully executed sonata). But the adjective ‘festive’ is more than just a synonym for ‘ceremonial’. Brahms himself – surely not entirely seriously? – described the overture as “a cheerful potpourri of songs à la Suppé”; but even if that description is a bit excessive and, at the same time  unnecessarily limiting, the presence of a series of student drinking songs ensures a vivacity and degree of humour that cannot fail to entertain. Certainly this version did that, with some lovely woodwind textures from the orchestra, the glorious statement of ‘We have built a stately house’ from the trumpets and the legato violins of ‘The Sovereign’ all very persuasively executed. Here, and everywhere else in the programme, the low strings of the orchestra were especially impressive, rich without cloying, rhythmically firm and flexible. Otaka maintained a strong sense of momentum, without any sense of things being strained or over-driven, and built to a radiant conclusion. The Academic Festival Overture was written at much the same time as the Tragic Overture – Otaka and his forces certainly made it meaningful to think of this as a symmetrically matching ‘Comic Overture’, the two pieces together articulating the two sides of a coin from Europe’s major cultural currency.

Otaka and the National Orchestra of Wales were joined by pianist Sunwook Kim for Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Kim, born in Seoul in 1988, won first prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2006, the youngest prize-winner for more than forty years. To Rachmaninov’s late pseudo-concerto Kim brought the necessary attack but, above all, a sense of space, a willingness and ability to let the music breathe. He was most impressive of all in the slow eleventh and twelfth variations and in the famous tune of variation eighteen. Kim played with a moving lyricism which stopped some way short of the sentimental. In a piece which is sometimes rushed and made excessively flamboyant, this was a reading which was most memorable in its more hushed moments, the National Orchestra of Wales playing with great delicacy. Soloist, conductor and orchestra found in the Rhapsody a dignity which not all performances discover and their performance also pleased in the way it conveyed a sense of larger design, persuading one that that the work had a real musical argument, rather than being merely additive. Kim is surely destined for considerable success.

James Gilchrist is a fine lyric tenor, distinguished not so much by the sheer quality of his voice (good though it is) as by the intelligence and sensitivity he brings to the interpretation of text – he is that rare sort of singer who brings out in me a desire to hear them reading poetry as well as singing it. He brought all his qualities to a passionate interpretation of On Wenlock Edge, in the orchestral arrangement made more than ten years after Vaughan Williams’s original setting of these six poems by Housman for tenor, piano and string quartet. My own preference is for that earlier version (of which Gilchrist has made an excellent recording with the Fitzwilliam Quartet and Anna Tilbrook, LINN CKD 296). In their bleakness and austerity of vision, Housman’s poems are better served by the intimacy of the earlier setting; the orchestral version tempts a degree of word-painting which at times seems to prettify the poems rather than accept their terrifying clarity. Here, James Gilchrist’s understanding and commitment were always evident; in ‘From far, from eve and morning’ there was a gentleness and near tenderness (or as near as Housman ever gets to that emotion) that was very moving; in ‘Is my team ploughing’ his vocal security and emotional involvement, along with Otaka’s outstanding control of orchestral dynamics, were impressive; Gilchrist’s reading of ‘Bredon Hill’ was particularly fine – although some of Vaughan Williams’s more ‘French’ orchestral gestures perhaps serve more to undermine than reinforce Housman’s words. Gilchrist’s heartfelt reading of the sequence certainly brought out, as well as one might hope, the controlled pain of these poems; he is one of the current masters of English song.

Having given two object lessons in the art of orchestral accompaniment, Otaka – recipient of the Elgar Medal from the Elgar Society in 2000 – closed the programme with the Enigma ‘Variations on an Original Theme’, Elgar’s kaleidoscope picture of some of the varieties of human nature. This reading of the work was perhaps at its best and more convincing in the more extrovert passages. The boisterousness of William Baker (in ‘W.M.B.), the tympani which introduce ‘Troyte’ and the barking of Dan the bulldog (in ‘G.R.S.’) were all played with particular affection and ebullience. The woodwinds and violins were pleasantly tripping in ‘Intermezzo: Dorabella’. ‘Nimrod’ was beautifully phrased and the cellos of the orchestra were at their best in ‘B.G.N.’. Elsewhere, in some of Elgar’s quieter moments (such as in the ‘Romanza’ – and he is surely a composer often at his best when quietest – there wasn’t perhaps the absolute inwardness which brings out the full beauty of the music. But this is no more than a tentative quibble about an impressive performance which grew to an assured but undogmatic conclusion. Otaka is certainly a fine Elgarian; but his range as a conductor is considerable and his returns to conduct the National Orchestra of Wales, of which he was Principal Conductor for nine years, are always welcome and always rewarding. This enticing start to the season was no exception.

 

Glyn Pursglove

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