SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Swansea Festival of Music and the Arts 2010 -  Mathias, Mahler, Schumann: BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Tadaaki Otaka, Llyr Williams (piano). Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, 9.10.2010 (NR)

 

Reviewing the performance of Mahler’s First Symphony by the orchestra of Welsh National Opera, back in May, my colleague Glyn Pursglove described astutely how the work resembles a modernist collage ahead of its time, in which different idioms and musical perspectives clash abrasively against each other, in a manner that must have shocked its first hearers in 1888. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales, under Tadaaki Otaka, were equally strongly attuned to the half-jumbled, half-dialectically structured character of this extraordinary piece. I sensed throughout also, in this performance, how although the symphony was actually composed in Leipzig, Mahler’s Viennese background – and indeed future – are strongly implicated in it, by way of the mutual infiltration of the urban and the pastoral which was always so marked in the traditions of Vienna and whose logic Mahler was in a sense merely extending.

This performance was outstanding: the brass brilliantly clear, the passages of decayed lyricism, in the third movement especially, coming across with full force under Otaka’s tensely energetic, fully committed conducting. There was a fine eerie stillness at the start, while the cuckoo and the army band call their fanfares to each other; and the suddenly exploding transition into the fourth movement, the ferocious stridency of the violins, like hamsters on caffeine, as my daughter put it, really took the breath away. This was of course only the first of the series of climactic statements with which Mahler tantalises the ear as it searches for resolution, up to the always unforgettable moment just before the end when the brass section rises to its feet and the stage under the lights becomes a mass of gold. It still appears as if the National Orchestra of Wales responds to Otaka, its music director for so long, with a warmth and an extra charge none of its very distinguished current run of conductors – Fischer, Roth, van Steen - can yet consistently draw out.

The concert had begun with the Dance Overture of 1962 by William Mathias, a sprightly, quirky, slightly film-score-ish piece held together by some witty quotations from Holst’s The Planets. Then Llyr Williams played Schumann’s Piano Concerto. Here, for the only time, I felt the orchestra not fully on its mettle at first, the woodwind that announces the principal theme sounding ever so slightly strained, but it wasn’t long before things warmed up. Llyr Williams – only 34, but already clearly one of the finest musicians so musical a nation as Wales has ever produced – gave a calm, authoritative, disciplined performance, resisting the temptation that isn’t always resisted, to squeeze the emotion from the piece rather than allowing it to emerge at its own speed. As a result the odd moments of rubato or extra emphasis were the more affecting. Not a showy or especially thrilling performance, then, but one respecting the classical restraint with which Schumann by this stage of his career was reining in the essentially mercurial and improvisatory character of his musical inspirations. It was encouraging to see the Brangwyn Hall pretty well full at a time when the Swansea Festival is going through somewhat precarious times.

Neil Reeve