SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Prom 12: Mussorgsky Adès, Prokofiev and Borodin: Sir John Tomlinson (bass), Anna Dennis (soprano), Louis Lortie (piano), City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Thomas Adès (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London 26.7.2008 (JPr)

 

• Mussorgsky, rev. Shebalin A Night on the Bare Mountain ('Sorochintsy Fair' version, 1880) (12 mins)
• Mussorgsky Boris Godunov - Coronation Scene; Boris's Monologue; Death Scene (25 mins)
• Interval
• Thomas Adès Tevot (23 mins)
• Interval
• Prokofiev Piano Concerto No.1 (15 mins)
• Borodin Polovtsian Dances (13 mins)

Anna Dennis mezzo-soprano
Sir John Tomlinson bass
Louis Lortie piano

City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Thomas Adès conductor

At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century,  most composers in St Petersburg did not make their primary living composing and this concert was generally one celebrating three of them :  apart from one musical item by a living composer-conductor, this was an old-fashioned Proms Russian evening.

Mussorgsky was initially an army officer and later, from time to time, a civil servant who left much music unfinished at the time of his fatal stroke in 1881. Nevertheless his influence on later composers such as Janáček was considerable, particularly in his association between speech intonations with rhythms and melody. Rimsky-Korsakov revised and completed a number of Mussorgsky's works and these versions are considered by many to be inferior to Mussorgsky’s innovative original compositions. The greatest of his creations was undoubtedly the opera Boris Godunov, with a thoroughly Russian historical subject based on Pushkin. He finished the first version in 1869 and a second version in the 1872, but it was Rimsky-Korsakov's version which was first performed outside Russia. The title role in the opera provides an important part for a bass. Other operas by Mussorgsky include Khovanshchina, completed and orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov to which a later version by Shostakovich restores more of the original text. The opera Sorochintsy Fair, after Gogol, completed by Lyadov and others, includes A Night on the Bare Mountain, an orchestral witches' sabbath.

This programme began with the unusual Sorotchinsky Fair version  of orchestral infernal romp complete with Sir John Tomlinson a little hard-pressed as Chernobog in amongst all the dwarves, witches and demons from the valiant City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus. It all seemed a very tame orgy however with a lukewarm musical temperature despite all of it  rushing on at a hectic tempo. The chorus were obviously well-schooled but sounded very English with no bite or attack to the Russian words. They could have learnt a lot in hindsight from Sir John Tomlinson’s magnificent diction despite his voice not being what it once was.

The failure of Thomas Adès’ conducting to generate a convincing Russian choral sound and  appropriate orchestra colour from the indefatigable members of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra continued during the Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov. However with Boris’s Monologue and Death Scene - where the focus shifted to Tomlinson’s incomparable dramatic gifts – was quite wonderful. Obvious vocal wear-and-tear was quite appropriate for the Tsar’s anguish and pleas for forgiveness and I doubt whether anyone but Tomlinson could make the ‘O Gospodi, Bozhe moy!’ (O God above, pity me) of the monologue quite so haunting. When he cried out again during his death scene, this  was emotionally both affecting and effective too.

To perform Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1, we had the Canadian, Louis Lortie,  whose laid back demeanour and dress made me think that the conductor was walking on with the piano tuner; the complete antithesis of Nigel Kennedy last week. He launched into a bravura performance of this energetic work whose percussive syncopated rhythms seem to have been taken in a different musical direction by the great jazz and blues masters later in the twentieth century. This is also reflected in the fact that nearly everything after the memorable introductory D flat major theme, including the cadenza, is a development or recapitulation of a limited number of musical ideas.

Borodin's friend Rimsky-Korsakov said of him: ‘Borodin was an exceedingly cordial and cultured man, pleasant and oddly witty to talk with. On visiting him I often found him working in the laboratory which adjoined his apartment. When he sat over his retorts filled with some colourless gas and distilled it by means of a tube from one vessel into another, I used to tell him that he was transfusing emptiness into vacancy.’ Borodin kept his job at the St Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy, even after he began composing substantial amounts of music. Two symphonies were completed by 1876 and his third symphony, begun in 1882, was not completed before he died of heart failure in 1887. Although he never had the time to compose all that he wanted to,  besides these symphonies, Borodin wrote piano music, short works and a major opera, Prince Igor which was also unfinished at the time of his death. Rimsky-Korsakov and one of his students, Alexander Glazunov, completed Prince Igor.

Thomas Adès gave us the Evening Chorus of Polovtsian Girls, Dance of the Polovtsian Girls and – another orchestra stand-alone favourite – the Polovtsian Dances. What I had begun to consider as the conductor ‘slash and burn’ style continued unabated. He had quite an expressive left hand that brought out an eloquent account of the quieter music from the orchestra such as the passage remembered later as ‘Stranger in Paradise’ from Kismet but when the music speeded up there was a good deal of chopping and stick pointing that appeared to have diminishing returns. A fine soprano, Anna Dennis, filled the Royal Albert Hall as the Polovtsian Girl and the Chorus sang with gusto. As this music is giddyingly exciting it fortunately cannot really fail.

This Prom was short on music (barely 90 minutes) yet needed two almost 25 minutes interval plus another shorter pause to push away the piano and concerts like this are certainly not good value for the paying audience. The longer intervals were either side of Adès’s own recent composition Tevot. The meaning of the word Tevot is open to debate; though in the Bible it is used to refer to ‘a place of safety’ - Moses’s reed basket and Noah’s ark. Perhaps the term refers to the music searching for some safer place, a melody perhaps? What starts off as fragments of musical statement did  seem to reach, by the end of a piece, a more profound conclusion. Around midway there is a passage for timpani, side drum and tuned anvils followed by a quieter interlude that is rather too clearly inspired by the Tristan prelude. Any doubters please listen to it online again while available and let me know if you think I am wrong. There are wisps of string sound which ascend upwards then descend to something reminiscent of a heart beat which seemed rather  like a mother cradling a baby in the ‘safety’ of her arms to me. I Thomas Adès must be hard at work at something else lately because he seemed to have forgotten Tevot, only around two years old, as his eyes rarely left the score in front of him. Throughout musical history there have always been debates about whether the composer is always the best conductor of his own music but I am sure that  Adès was the right person here.  Whether he was wholly appropriate for the Russian music I was not so certain.

Jim Pritchard

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