Bartók, Beethoven:  Olivier Charlier (violin), BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Tadaaki Otaka (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 2.05.08 (GPu)

Bartók, Divertimento for Strings
Bartók, Violin Concerto No. 1
Beethoven, Symphony No. 7


Tadaaki Otaka is very much not the conductor-as-inspired-genius, the conductor as visible-star-of-the-proceedings, or the conductor as charismatic individualist. One wouldn’t guarantee to recognise performances conducted by Otaka in some sort of ‘blind’ listening test. But in such a test one would be able, confidently, to dismiss some performances as clearly not his work – all of those that employed exaggerated extremes and contrasts of dynamic or tempos, all of those which seemed wilfully determined to be ‘individual’, to be quirkily distinctive. For Otaka the composer matters and the music is never in danger of becoming a vehicle for his ego. Performances conducted by Otaka are usually marked by their high competence and discipline, by their intelligence and by their unpedantic fidelity to the score. All of these virtues (and what are, perhaps, their complementary limitations) were very much in evidence in this well-designed programme.

Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings was commissioned by Paul Sacher – who also provided a chalet at Saanen, in the Bernese Oberland in which the composer might do the writing. That’s real patronage! The work was written in less than three weeks in the summer of 1939; though not entirely without shadows of forthcoming events, the three movements of the Divertimento are marked by their wit and their particularly Bartókian grace. In the opening movement (allegro ma non troppo) there was an immediate feeling of the dance, Otaka’s reading of the music being sensitive to small gradations of dynamics and never tempted to over-inflate this often delicate (and yet robust!) music. The outer movements of this Divertimento give us a Bartók unusually close to neo-classicism; the peasant rhythms Haydn are sometimes echoed, peasantries sophisticated but never merely ironised by the composer. Otaka and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales communicated a thoroughly apt sense of the mild humour of some of this – not least in the delightfully affectionate parody of a café polka (with composers other than Haydn evoked!) in the closing allegro assai. In between the two outer movements, the central molto adagio is one of those whispering-rustling-haunted-menacing night musics of which Bartok is the master. Otaka’s precision brought out powerfully the startling emotional effects produced by the alternation of muted and unmuted strings. Right from the hypnotic opening of the movement, with its evocation of small movements both in the natural world and in the night-time mind, through the lyrical angularities and seeming discontinuities of later parts of the movement, the balance of stillness and activity, the intense stillness fractured by suddenly eruptive cries of emotion, and even pain, this was a fine and compelling reading.

Bartók’s first Violin Concerto didn’t receive quite so compelling a performance, though. It is, of course, a work with a remarkable history. It’s origins lay in the young composer’s infatuation with the talented (and beautiful) violinist Stefi Geyer. Bartók began work on the concerto on July 1^st 1907. Its two movements present – in Bartók’s own words – in the first “an idealised portrait of Stefi Geyer, ethereal and tender” and, in the second, a picture of her art as a violinist and of her as “joyfully brilliant and entertaining”. Describing the work as “my declaration of love for you”, he presented the score to Stefi Geyer early in 1908. At around the same time, Geyer declared their love impossible (Bartók’s pain was such that he told her she had “signed his death warrant”). Geyer kept the score and it was only released after her death in 1956, being first performed in 1958. Bartók described the work as “a narcotic dream of passion … written straight from the heart”, and the sheer intensity, the near-abandonment that such words imply was perhaps missing from this performance. The whole (and especially the first movement) of this concerto is a musical version of that experience of which Dante’s account of his love for Beatrice is the classic example, an experience in which the beloved remains both human and a ‘revelation’ of something more than merely human. The music of the first movement has, thus, an ecstatic dimension which this performance never quite caught; there was ardour and yearning but never, quite, the sense of transcendence. In truth, Olivier Charlier seemed more at home and more thoroughly convincing in the second movement, where the rapture is more social and where the exuberant virtuosity of the writing brought from him some very impressive playing, full of vitality and excited energy. In the (serious) playfulness of this second movement – with themes inverted, allusions to gipsy music and a German children’s song – their was much from soloist, orchestra and conductor that was witty and alert, alongside much that spoke of the heart’s yearnings. A good, rather than a great performance.

If there are echoes of Haydn sometimes to be heard in Bartók’s Divertimento, a German children’s song (‘The donkey is a stupid animal’) to be heard even in the intensity of the Violin Concerto, there are also reminders of Haydn and echoes of an Austrian pilgrim hymn to be heard in Beethoven’s Seventh. But, like Bartók, Beethoven transforms such materials, in terms of both energy and scale. The scherzo for example, with the quasi-peasant rhythms of its opening, is Haydn writ large. Everywhere in the Seventh the emotions are large, the affirmation positively heroic, the music insistent in its enactment of energy and joy. Ten years before the composition of the seventh symphony, Coleridge (born just two years after Beethoven) was writing (in ‘Dejection, An Ode’) of how “we receive but what we give” and how “from the soul itself must issue forth / A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud”, defining “this strong music in the soul … /  … this beautiful and beauty-making power” as “Joy”:
 

Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud –
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light.

Beethoven’s Seventh is one of music’s most perfect crystallisations of the “voice” of joy, perfect in its exuberance and gravity, in its recognition of the profundity of the emotion and its spiritual and physical significance, of its necessary shadowing by that which is not joyful. This was a performance which communicated that joy in full, or something like it. The sostenuto introduction had dignity and a sense of potential, of energies awaiting release; with the vivace it was hard not to think of metaphors of organic growth, of seeds opening, life burgeoning. Exuberance and playfulness were the hallmarks of the first movement, the fitting metaphors more obviously human as the movement proceeded, an issuing forth (to borrow Coleridge’s phraseology), an openness to the ‘joyful’ experience of the world, most radiantly so in its conclusion. The allegretto, one of Beethoven’s most remarkable symphonic movements, was by turn hypnotic its rhythms and orchestrally spare, redolent of both march – even a kind of funeral march – and hymn. In its interplay of theme and motif it paradoxically contrives an air of both spontaneity and inevitability. The lower strings of the orchestra were particularly impressive here, notably at the movement’s end. The scherzo began impetuously and Otaka drew out very attractively – and without overemphasis – the contrasts of tempo in this glowingly affirmative movement. In the finale, with its rapid semiquavers, its use of instruments played at the very top end of their registers, its unexpected accents, the orchestral work was of a high order, the music allowed to run and flow without any sense of mere haste, even when most hard-driven, the conclusion balancing aggressive energy with an opulent celebration of the inner stillness of ‘Joy’. This was a performance which well merited the enthusiastic audience response with which it was greeted.

The three works programmed together here made for an enjoyable – and thought-provoking evening. The performances throughout were at a level of the highest competence, if not especially individualised (and, of course, that is not necessarily a bad thing). I don’t mean it to sound as if I am damning him with faint praise if I say that Otaka is an utterly reliable conductor; what one can rely on is a respect for the music, a refusal of any kind of self-aggrandisement and an admirable musical coherence, a capacity to think in terms of the whole rather than allowing himself to be fascinated by the individual passage. These are, indeed, considerable virtues and – happily – they were well displayed in this concert.

Glyn Pursglove

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