United Kingdom Johann Strauss II, Berg, Brahms: Alena Baeva (violin), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra / Mark Wigglesworth (conductor). Lighthouse, Poole, 22.1.2025. (CK)
Johann Strauss II – The Blue Danube
Berg – Violin Concerto
Brahms – Symphony No.2
It was good to be again within the Lighthouse with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra; although three weeks into a chilly January, with Storm Eowyn imminent, it already felt quite retro to be listening to Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube (Prosit Neues Jahr and all that). Nonetheless, it was a stunning curtain-raiser, Mark Wigglesworth easing his gamers into these immortal melodies, whipping up pleasure when it was wanted; and it supplied heartening proof – much more than Wagner’s Mastersingers Overture final November – that conductor and orchestra are understanding, and liking, one another quite effectively.
The live performance was titled Viennese Whirls; although with Berg and Brahms offering the substantial fare Carinthian Capers may need finished simply as effectively. Too frivolous for these profound works, I do know, however it’s fascinating that geographically they’re shut neighbours – each had been written of their composers’ nation retreats, a brief distance aside on the shores of the Wörthersee in Carinthia (temporally, they’re over half a century aside). Once I visited Berg’s home his automotive was nonetheless within the storage: the curator recalled taking Claudio Abbado and Zubin Mehta for a spin in it whereas they had been learning in Vienna.
Alena Baeva, in a gold, Grecian-style gown, seemed – completely appropriately – as if she had stepped out of a Klimt portray. Having final heard the Berg Violin Concerto in a efficiency that was all shredded nerve-ends and existential despair (I exaggerate), it was beautiful to listen to her considerate and delightful account, a little bit demure and underpowered within the extra dramatic episodes of the second motion – partly a matter of steadiness with the orchestra – however discovering the radiance which the work’s later, Bach-inspired stretches demand. It was additionally a steady pleasure to take pleasure in Berg’s orchestration, so clearly laid out by gamers and conductor; the vital percussion components, for instance, had been sensitively dealt with all through, and the contributions of the horns and woodwind (and, certainly, the strings) had been finely and sometimes delicately made. The Bach chorale, within the mild palms of the quartet of clarinets, was ineffable.
There’s a lot depth, heartache and heartbreak locked into this piece – the dying of younger Manon Gropius, Berg’s advanced relationships with girls, from the kitchen maid who bore him a baby at seventeen to his lengthy adulterous affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, and the rising sense that it’s his personal requiem; but when the music begins – no less than, in a efficiency as pure as this – it’s its personal testomony, needing no rationalization of the twelve-tone system, quantity symbolism or anything. The music’s successive moods – capricious, harrowing, reflective and so forth – took their locations in a beguiling musical journey that ended, quite as Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde does, in an evaporation into the huge blue yonder. Baeva’s efficiency was warmly – greater than that, virtually ecstatically – acquired: she is that this season’s BSO Artist-in-Residence, and the partnership is paying dividends.
After the interval we had been afforded the posh – for thus it’s, in a chilly January – of basking for forty minutes in Carinthian sunshine. This efficiency of Brahms’s Second Symphony was suffused with the identical qualities that had endeared Johann Strauss and Berg to us: it sounded completely pure, natural, by no means hurried. It was fascinating to see how Wigglesworth (conducting from reminiscence) went about creating the Brahms sound – swaying a little bit in sympathy with the music, moulding phrases economically with palms and arms: and a splendidly homogeneous, glowing, unsensational Brahms sound is what we bought. In fact there was pleasure – the ending of the finale was as thrilling appropriately – however the sleek and undemonstrative oneness of orchestra and conductor, of conception and execution, was one of many chief joys of the efficiency. The principal horn and her entire part deserved their bow, and it was completely proper that the cellos had been dropped at their ft earlier than the total strings: however this was a collective achievement. I’m trying ahead to this partnership’s subsequent live performance in just a few weeks’ time: an intriguing programme, together with one other Brahms symphony.
Chris Kettle
