SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mozart, Ravel, Prokofiev: Jean-Yves Thibaudet (piano), London Philharmonic Orchestra / Vladimir Jurowski (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 6. 3.2008 (GPu)

Mozart, Symphony No. 38 (Prague)
Ravel, Piano Concerto in G
Prokofiev, Symphony No. 5


Vladmir Jurowski has an austerity about his stage manner and appearance  which seems to verge on the spiritual. He often talks of conducting in terms of spirituality and it is certainly not merely a matter of publicity that interviews with him generally find time to mention his daily yoga sessions. This is from an interview with Tom Service published in the Guardian in December 2006:

“‘I discovered the Tao Te King of Lao Tse about five years ago. It’s one of the most important books in the history of mankind.’ Jurowski’s interest in spirituality began as a student in Moscow. He spent the whole of his first grant at the conservatoire, the princely sum of 37 roubles and 50 kopecks, on a Bible. ‘We were never able to have a Bible at home, but this was 1987, so Gorbachev’s glasnost was beginning to have its effects, and there were unofficial booksellers on the streets. It was a Bible in Russian, and I still have it. My parents thought I was losing my mind.’ Jurowski sees music and spirituality as deeply connected, and his daily yoga practice is as important to him as his life in music. ‘The way yoga changes your perception of the world is amazing. It’s another kind of ecstatic experience.’”

Jean-Yves Thibaudet has, to quote the biographical note included in the programme of the present concert “impacted the fashion world with concert attire designed by London fashion designer Vivienne Westwood”. In an interview with Thibaudet, by Cheryl North, conducted in October 2006, it is said that he “resembles a leading man in a romantic French movie or the 19th-century heartthrob pianist Franz Liszt with a modern haircut”. Thibaudet says that “playing the piano for me is a most sensual experience.” But like Jurowski he is a man of wide culture and reading and though they are – so far as one can judge without personal knowledge of either – rather different personalities, they proved perfect partners in an outstanding performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G which was the centre-piece of this concert.

It is a work with which Thibaudet has long been familiar. Indeed, brought up in Lyon, initially taught by his mother, at the age of 9 he played this very concerto with a local orchestra. Certainly his playing in this present concert – with an orchestra of more than merely local reputation! – suggested both ease and familiarity with the music and a continuing sense of excitement and discovery. As befits a man who has recorded with Bill Evans and made a CD of compositions by Duke Ellington, Thibaudet handled the jazzier passages of the opening allegramente with a panache that sometimes escapes other pianists. There was a real sense of fantasy in this first movement, Thibaudet playing with great flair and an air of spontaneity which made sense of the heterogeneous moods and idioms that characterise this music, as much at home in the Spanish-flavoured passages as in the jazzier-bluesier music and, indeed, in the quasi-Romantic slow interlude. One had the sense that Thibaudet’s was the dominant presence here, that Jurowski was – in a fashion that some other conductors might surely emulate – was willing to understand his role as supportive, perhaps more as a matter of support than leadership (of course these are, except in extreme cases,  only distinctions of emphasis, merely ways of distinguishing between different kinds of partnership).  The opening of the second movement (adagio assai) was played by Thibaudet with a wonderful sense of melodic line, almost childlike in its simplicity but full of emotional weight too. The effect was quite entrancing – the sort of musical experience that makes it hard to remember that you have to write a review afterwards! The dialogue with the orchestra was beautifully handled, and Jurowski drew from strings and woodwinds colours of great beauty without ever being remotely self- indulgent. The third movement zipped along with tremendous vitality and pace, exuding fun and impudence, with more than a hint of the circus – but a very sophisticated circus! This was an outstanding performance which rightly received a rapturous reception.

The evening had begun with a mildly disappointing reading of Mozart’s Prague symphony. There was a slight degree of detachment about the performance, and though there were lots of details to admire, lots of assured and accomplished musicianship, the whole was somehow slightly less than the sum of its parts. It was hard to pin down why, though some of the phrasing in the andante was a little stilted and the movement as a whole didn’t quite have the interplay of light and shadow, that sense of graver depths beneath the serene surface that the very best performances have. Perhaps overall, the problem was that the work was too carefully sculpted, too tightly controlled, so that the results were slightly mannered, as if the music was a little too tightly constricted rather than being allowed to breathe. It was, of course, a good performance, but short of the very best.

The Prokofiev which closed the evening  on the other hand, was outstanding.  This is a work in which Jurowski has already distinguished himself – as in his recording with the Russian National Orchestra (Pentatone PTC5186083). The Fifth Symphony was written (though in no simple sense) as a response to the end of the Second World War. That war had cost some twenty million Russian lives. Any reaction to its conclusion, to victory, was necessary complex and conflicted. This Fifth Symphony has sometimes been seen (and heard) in too simplified a fashion, presented as an almost comfortably optimistic statement. Prokofiev’s own observation, “I conceived of it as a symphony on the greatness of the human soul”, has sometimes been cited in support of such a view. But any measure of the “greatness of the human soul” goes way beyond both the optimistic and the public – King Lear might be said to be a play about “the greatness of the human soul” but it is as far from being optimistic as a work of art might very well be. One measure of the greatness of the human soul is to do with its capacity to understand and reconcile contradictions, to be, simultaneously, a place of fear and hope, exhaustion and exhilaration, death and life.

Jurowski’s reading of the symphony finds in it many of these conflicted emotions and reconciles them coherently. The slowness of his tempo at the beginning (especially) of the opening movement evoked a sense of resurgent powers slowly coming into new life but also a sense of the dreadful suffering out of which it was growing. There was no facile optimism here. Hope and relief, yes, but also barely suppressed anger and horrifying memories. Jurowski’s attention to detail was evident and the control of dynamic and colour was absolute and, just as absolutely, in the service of an utterly persuasive (and deeply felt) vision of the whole. Here and elsewhere, militaristic echoes, whether in the use of the brass and the percussion or in the ghosts of march and processional rhythms were as disquieting as they were optimistic.

In the second movement (allegro marcato) darkness and light continued to interact, to draw out each other’s significance; at times the tone was sardonically biting, any hints of joy always qualified; this was a scherzo full of a sense of physicality, its happiest passages almost dangerously manic. Jurowski’s conducting – and the playing of the LPO – was riveting in its handling of instrumental dialogue and echo across and around the stage, and the climax was a masterpiece of power and precision. The adagio brought a reading full of gravity, the lower strings especially fine in music which makes one realise anew that Prokofiev owes things to Tchaikovsky, not least a capacity for music of a great and yearning sadness. This was an intensely powerful threnody, an expression of grief both tense and with glimpses of light. One of the great movements in Prokofiev’s output, Jurowski did it full justice in a performance which reconciled both the intimate and public dimensions of the music. Even in the closing movement – which Prokofiev marks allegro giocoso – Jurowski tempered any sense of playful joyousness with an embracing awareness of context, musical, personal and historical. There was little that was relaxed here, and there was a sense in the driving rhythms that one can be controlled by larger forces more readily than one controls them. In short this was a performance which seemed to bring out (persuasively and without wilfulness) the true complexity of a remarkable symphony. It rounded off an impressive concert.

Glyn Pursglove


Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page