SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Messiaen, Prokofiev, Stravinsky: Tamara Stefanovich (piano), Juho Pohjonen (piano), Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 9.2.2008 (GPu)

Messiaen, Oiseaux exotiques
Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No.5
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring


It was good programming to juxtapose the gloss and urbanity of Prokofiev’s last piano concerto with the sheer power of Stravinky’s Rite. These two very different versions of sophisticated (which Stravinky’s work certainly is, for all its famous supposed ‘barbarism’) Russian music written in exile made a fascinating pair, and showed off different aspects of the Philharmonia’s considerable orchestral accomplishment. It was good, too, to have the chance to hear a beguiling – and substantial – work by Messiaen, occupying yet a third sound world.

It was with the Messiaen that the evening began. Pianist Tamara Stefanovich joined the seventeen instrumentalists of the Philharmonia, in Oiseaux exotiques, for piano, wind and percussion. First performed in March 1956, Oiseaux exotiques is structured as a series of five cadenzas for piano with, either side of each cadenza, a section for the instrumental ensemble. Oiseaux exotiques belongs to the period of Reveil des oiseaux (1953) and Catalogue d’oiseaux (1958), the period when Messiaen’s musical fascination with birdsong was perhaps at its most intense and dominating. Its tintinnabulatory and percussive opening is wonderfully evocative; here, as elsewhere, most of us will simply have to settle for a generalised idea of ‘exotic’ birds, rather than having the ornithological knowledge to identify the Laughing Thrush whose song informs this introduction or, indeed, such later birds as the Minah Mesia, the Leafbird (beautifully voiced by the piccolo), the Baltimore Oriole or the Cardinal, let alone the splendidly named Californian Thrasher (represented on the xylophone). For non-specialists, the effect is not so much one of individual voices as the creation of a sense of quasi-natural opulence, of a musical landscape densely populated by a cast-list of birds which would never be assembled in a single natural environment, since it features creatures from a great many different eco-systems and locations – both the Americas, India, South-East Asia and (a little nearer to home) the Canary Islands.

Some of the most delightful of Messiaen’s musical effects come from the use of the Keyed Glock (admirably played by Liz Burley), especially when doubled by the other percussion. The Serbian pianist Tamara Stefanovich was an accomplished and committed soloist, playing at times with an almost improvisatory-like freedom and intensity. In the first piano cadenza she played with a pleasing sense of space, refusing to rush at things, allowing individual notes to resonate and making the silences as important as the sounds. The third cadenza was full of ravishing pianistic chirrups, the fifth marked by some splendid right hand trills. The instrumental ensemble was also first-rate, the percussion section never overbearing and always attentive to what others were doing. All-in-all, that odd Messiaen compound of the naïve and the sophisticated was well articulated in an enjoyable performance.

No doubting the dominance of the sophisticated in the high-gloss music of Prokofiev’s fifth piano concerto. Written in France in 1932, and premiered in Berlin – with the composer as soloist and the BPO conducted by Furtwängler, it must have been quite a concert, with Hindemith as soloist in Harold in Italy – this is a thoroughly urbane piece of music. There’s no naivety here – let alone any bird song. It is, though, full of that particular icy sparkle which no one else does quite as well as Prokofiev – and there are plenty of good tunes. It is perhaps a bit short on emotional warmth, but it certainly got excellent advocacy on this particular occasion. This was the first occasion on which I had heard the Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen live. In his mid twenties (but looking barely out of his teens), Puhjonen gave a quite outstanding reading of the concerto, a concerto in which the soloist is hardly ever silent. The difficulties of Prokofiev’s writing were handled with panache, the wit was relished and, when the few such opportunities came along (notably in the larghetto) he played with real lyricism. Handling the syncopation of some passages with ease and assurance, playing by turns percussively and delicately, richly dancing in the fifth movement finale, Puhjonen’s was a remarkable performance, full both of intimacy and sweep. Esa–Pekka Salonen’s conducting of the Philharmonia was exemplary, an object lesson in concerto conducting, supportive, attentive, giving the occasional nudge, maintaining the weight and balance of orchestral sound sympathetically and unfussily. This fifth concerto is relatively neglected – it is heard a good deal less often than the first three; anybody hearing this performance would surely have wondered why. The whole had the kind of tightly-laced precision that much of Prokofiev’s music requires, without ever becoming merely dandyish. The larghetto drew playing of great beauty from both soloist and orchestra – one of those rare moments when one is reminded that Prokofiev was a countryman of Rachmaninov’s, and born less than twenty years after him. Is this movement immune from Prokofiev’s irony? It was played here as if that were the case. I wonder? The sheer playfulness with which the final vivo opens almost made one suspicious of what had just gone before. Prokofiev was a lover of crossword puzzles (a compiler as well as a completer) and he is ever ready to set his hearers puzzles. It was a measure of how well Puhjonen, Salonen and the Philharmonia had taken the measure of this concerto that the audience were left with just the right kind – and number – of puzzles.

Stravinsky was born exactly in the middle of that gap of eighteen years which separates the births of Rachmaninov (1873) and Prokofiev (1891), being born in 1882. Mere chronology obviously says little about musical history! For me, at least, it takes a good live performance (it never makes its full impact on disc) to make me feel anew the extraordinary achievement of The Rite – its scale, inventiveness, rich complexity, sheer power, sense of orchestral space and colour, its carefully constructed illusion of the uncontrolled, and so much else. Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia relished pretty well every aspect of the work, though my use of the verb “relish” shouldn’t be allowed to give the impression that there was anything self-indulgent about the performance; orchestras and conductors can sometimes seem to reduce the work to a kind of orchestral showpiece, but there was never any danger of that happening here.  The opening measures – and re Messiaen there are more than a few birdcalls in there too – were haunting, the woodwinds of the Philharmonia excellent here as elsewhere; soon the full orchestra was generating immense rhythmic momentum, in a performance which never lost the sense of the dance. There have been more purely ‘barbarous’ Rites than this, performances more committed to sheer power and frenzy; but this was a performance with room for real subtlety, a performance as keen to build up a sense of the ominous and mysterious as to punch home every climax (though it didn’t really fall short in that regard either). Salonen’s conducting was unpedantically attentive to detail, without ever losing any larger sense of shape; indeed there was something architectural in which each section was added to its predecessors. But for all the sense of form, the performance also vividly communicated the Stravinskyan sense of the fertility ritual – but then rituals have strict forms. Certainly complexities of tone became possible because of the impressive way in which the orchestral sound was both weighty and relatively transparent; this was ensemble work of a high quality and it was all in the service of a coherent vision of the music. The qualities of Salonen’s conducting and the Philharmonia’s playing were evident not least in slower passages, every bit as attention-compelling, every bit as expressive as the more frenzied passages.

I haven’t heard a better live performance of The Rite – and I suspect that I shan’t hear many such in future years. The Rite is the quintessentially modernist work; both that and its archetypal Russianness were richly evident here. Put the date 29 May 2013 in your diary – that will be the hundredth anniversary of the first performance of this extraordinary work which still sounds both startlingly new and, in another sense, as old as the hills.

The current season of concerts by visiting orchestras at St. David’s Hall providing some fine concerts, and there’s more to come, with visits due from – amongst others -  Juroswki and the LPO, Christoph von Dohnányi and Andreas Hafliger with the Philharmonia (again), and Cecilia Bartoli with the Basel Chamber Orchestra. They will have to be on top form to be a musical match for this particular concert (as one punter said to me as we have left – “I was there to see Wales beat Scotland this afternoon, and now this. Saturdays don’t come any better!)

Glyn Pursglove