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Beethoven, Mahler:  Janine Jansen (violin), Philharmonia Orchestra, / Charles Dutoit (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 22.11.2008 (GPu)

Beethoven, Violin Concerto
Mahler, Symphony No. 1


This was the first occasion on which I have heard Janine Jansen live, though I have heard and admired a number of her recordings. Her performance of the Beethoven Violin concerto in the first half of this concert didn’t disappoint, though I did find it a somewhat ‘narrow’ reading of the work. Playing a Stradivarius instrument of 1727 (the ‘Barrere’), Jansen’s tone had a beautiful purity and clarity and her control of dynamics was exquisite. Her melodic lines were beautifully shaped and crystalline. But sometimes that crystalline purity seemed to come at the cost of a certain limitation of expressiveness, so that the overall reading had a kind of chaste beauty which missed some of the robustness that the most multi-faceted interpretations of the piece (I think of Oistrakh, for example), find in it. At the premiere of the concerto at the Theatr an der Wein in December of 1806, the soloist Franz Clement is said (I don’t know on what evidence) to have inserted between the first and the subsequent movements some lighter pieces, one of which involved his playing his instrument upside down! Whether true or not, one might take the story as illustrative of an approach to the violin which is as far removed from Janine Jansen’s playing as anything might very well be! Just occasionally I did find myself wishing – not for such vaudeville tricks! – for a slightly grainer, less pure tone, a little more weight of sound. But once one had familiarised oneself with the sound world of Jansen’s reading this was certainly a lovely performance, and Dutoit was an utterly sympathetic accompanist.

Jansen’s account of the Larghetto was particularly attractive, a model of rapt elegance which benefited from Dutoit’s beautifully scaled and considerate direction and some fine playing from the Philharmonia. The almost trance-like intensity of Jansen’s playing here embodied a kind of ultimate in refinement, the increasingly subtle decorations of the variations played with a precision and clarity achieved without the slightest sacrifice of fluidity of line. The interpolations of the muted orchestral violins, the horns and the brief solo clarinet and bassoon, were all perfectly calculated and the whole was a delight. In the opening movement, Dutoit’s marshalling of orchestral colour was impressive and unforced, whether in the opening deployment of the percussion, the interplay of trumpets and drums in the development or the finely played passages after the cadenza (not least in the lovely bassoon solo). Jansen played with a fair degree of fire and energy without being completely convincing; here, and in parts of the final movement, I, at least, would have liked a little more sheer physicality in her sound. In the last movement, consistent with what had gone before, the reading emphasised vivacious elegance more than Beethovenian humour. The dance rhythms of this movement have often sounded more robust, a good deal more full of outdoor playfulness than they did here, where the note of polite society dominated. In short, while there was much to admire in this performance, it was, inevitably, a partial account of a great concerto, one which put its stress on the grace and refinement of the work – which were articulated outstandingly – but failed to do full justice to other dimensions of the work.

In the second half of the concert we were treated to a fine performance of Mahler’s First Symphony, in which Charles Dutoit showed himself well in control of the work’s complexities of tone and argument. When the earlier five-movement version of the symphony had its first performance in Budapest in November 1889 (the version we are more familiar was published in 1899), it had a programme from Jean Paul Richter’s novel Titan and the last movement carried the title ‘Dall’inferno al Paradiso’. It is around dualities and the progress (or at any rate the movement) between them that Mahler’s symphony is essentially structured, whether such dualities be as cosmic (and moral/emotional) as inferno and paradiso, or slightly more modest as in the antitheses between private and public, country and city, innocence and sophistication, tenderness and violence, pride and modesty, affection and scorn. Dutoit’s podium manner is remarkably unfussy; he has the air of a man quietly doing a job of work, quite without histrionics; he achieves a sense of detachment on the podium, almost of being an ironic observer of (here) the strange things that the music was doing, while ensuring that it did them. The effect was very beguiling and persuasive; it was perhaps unsurprising that when he turned to face the audience at the work’s close he looked ashen with exhaustion, the dualities finally transcended.

The opening ‘dawn’ music of the first movement was exquisite, with an appealingly rough-edged rusticity (though some of the songbirds perhaps sounded just a little bookish and overeducated); that rusticity was, properly, soon replaced by the urban sophisticate’s pastoral idealisation of the genuinely rural (another of the work’s many dualities). The interplay of the two opening ideas – a theme in the woodwinds and a series of fanfares played by the clarinets and distant trumpets was handled with a confidence-winning certainty of touch and promised the fine performance which followed. Transitions from the relatively cheerful theme in the cellos to the sobriety and stillness of the recapitulation of the opening and then to the lively theme played by the horns were all of them carefully considered, the edges sufficiently hard to make clear the kind of collage-like juxtapositions so characteristic of Mahler, but never so hard as to jar or fragment the music’s onward cohesive impulse. In the second movement there were plenty of (metaphorical) ground-thumping feet in the opening dance in triple time, and the lower strings were particularly effective in the affectionately rustic Ländler. This movement is perhaps as close as Mahler ever comes to unironised simplicity and Dutoit was pleasingly willing to take it at face value. In the third movement, there are no such simple truths. Dutoit was responsive to all the grotesqueries of the movement – without once seeming to stray into overstatement; or, perhaps one should say, all his overstatements were Mahler’s, were in the score. The Callot-inspired Huntsman’s Funeral was full of macabre fancifulness, its source as a children’s illustration acknowledged, but shot through with a sombre menace at almost every turn. Charm and horror coexisted powerfully. Gradually the sense of unease prevailed, the end of the movement powerfully disturbing, the march to death now both vulgar and sardonic. The explosive opening of the fourth movement might seem to promise some kind of release from complexity and ambiguity but, in truth, it heralds yet more simultaneities and juxtapositions of feeling. Dutoit’s interpretation here was a model of relaxed purposefulness, his air of detachment seeming to allow – rather than force – the music’s many transitions. The monumentality of the opening was superbly impressive, grandeur piled upon grandeur, with the Philharmonia’s brass and percussion heard at their best. The lyrical sublimation of Viennese song in the long second theme was equally fine, yet increasingly full of doubts and self-questionings. The movement from the demonic to the paradisal is – as one would expect with Mahler – far from simple. Mahler’s paradise turns out to be a fairly brassy place, making one think of what Milton describes as the song sung before the heavenly throne “with saintly shout” (‘At A Solemn Music’). Juxtaposed with some paradisally hushed string playing in a reminiscence of the first movement’s opening materials, a sense was achieved, under Dutoit’s seemingly relaxed but obviously well disciplined control, of an immense, precariously achieved coherence, a kind of affirmation by inclusion, rather than exclusion, of life’s dualities.

The Beethoven concerto which opened the programme was a very good performance of a certain kind; the Mahler First was, without such qualification, a stirringly intelligent and sensitive reading of a complex work.

Glyn Pursglove


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