United Kingdom Bacewicz, Busoni: Kirill Gerstein (piano), BBC Symphony Refrain (males’s voices), BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo (conductor). Barbican Corridor, London, 1.11.2024. (CK)
Gražyna Bacewicz – Symphony No.2
Busoni – Piano Concerto
This was a night when Sakari Oramo put us additional in his debt: and I’m not even speaking about the primary occasion. 20 years in the past, throughout his tenure with the Metropolis of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, he made good-looking amends for the neglect of the early-twentieth century English composer John Foulds; together with his BBC Symphony Orchestra he continues to champion the Croatian composer Dora Pejačević, having memorably carried out her symphony throughout final 12 months’s BBC Proms; and he opened this live performance with the Second Symphony of Polish composer Gražyna Bacewicz. He has already recorded her Third and Fourth Symphonies; I’ve not heard them, and this efficiency was my first expertise of Bacewicz’s music.
A violin virtuoso, a busy and dedicated lynchpin of Polish musical life, a pupil of Wanda Landowska, a composer whose neo-classical instincts needed to be tempered (on the time she wrote this symphony) by Stalinist Socialist Realism; she is an interesting determine. This work comes comparatively early in a stylistic trajectory that was to be influenced by Bartók, then serialism and the avant-garde: however on the proof of this symphony she has a powerful and particular person voice, and a musical integrity which marks her out as no mere follower of vogue. She died in 1969, however I write of her as a up to date: the immediacy of her music makes her so.
The primary motion is headed Con passione. Spacious, sonorous strings with an undertow of quietly menacing low brass and timpani generate ardour, and pressure too: this offers method to lyrical music shaped from a texture of particular person voices – woodwinds and horn. The gestures are agency and assured, the tone largely darkish in color, the contrasts clear – a shaft of sunshine from the woodwinds towards pizzicato strings; a quick however emphatic upsurge of brass to finish. The sluggish motion (Lento tranquillo) begins with a relatively mysterious chant on the winds over softly pacing pizzicato strings. A horn sounds over Sibelian rustlings; the mantra returns over a three-note ostinato on the double basses, and the music recedes over a quiet aspect drum and the ostinato determine transferred to the timpani.
The Scherzo and Finale put the orchestra by means of its paces, they usually responded with enjoying of rhythmic sharpness, chew and brilliance. In his programme notice Paul Griffiths detected the Eroica behind the busy Beethovenian bustling of the strings within the Scherzo; but it surely put me in thoughts of the corresponding motion of Havergal Brian’s Third Symphony (Brian’s Eroica, if you’ll – how I want I may hear Oramo and the BBC SO getting their enamel into that). Bacewicz definitely is aware of the way to write a briskly triumphant ending: snap, crackle and pop.
This very good efficiency made the very best case for the symphony: 20 minutes of constant and continually evolving vitality. It refreshingly avoids monumentality – its optimism is a a lot leaner and tauter factor than the kind favoured by Stalin’s apparatchiks. Griffiths commented on the audible affect of Stravinsky and Bartók: but to my untutored ear there’s a Nordic pressure too.
We have been mainly there, although, for Ferruccio Busoni. Kirill Gerstein’s efficiency of the Piano Concerto was merely staggering. Benjamin Grosvenor’s efficiency at this 12 months’s Proms, with Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, triumphantly conveyed its epic qualities, its grandeur; even – with an invisible male refrain within the Royal Albert Corridor’s Gallery – its transcendence. Gerstein’s efficiency, beautifully matched by Oramo and the BBC SO, definitely wasn’t in need of epic grandeur, however within the Barbican Corridor’s acoustic – Gerstein entrance and centre of a crowded stage – the highlight was on the extraordinary vary and number of his pianism.
Again in March on this corridor, in George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto with Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra, I discovered his enjoying percussive virtually to the purpose of brutality; however Gerstein is a considerate musician relatively than merely a Klaviertiger. He produced all of the cascading thunder the piece calls for, and within the delicate passages he sprayed notes like tiny droplets; the music’s structural contours have been firmly positioned by a powerful left hand.
The concerto rests on the mighty pillars of the primary, third and fifth actions. The central Pezzo serioso, 20 minutes lengthy and in 4 steady sections, is probably the place the problem to the viewers’s focus is best; not right here, although the work’s furthest reaches of fantasy and brilliance are attained within the intervening Pezzo giocoso and Tarantella (reminders that Busoni himself was an virtually superhuman pianist, and that he bestrode his native Italian as forcefully as his adopted German tradition). Gerstein’s enjoying – whether or not glowing like a heap of diamonds or pounding like a ship’s engine – needed to be heard to be believed, however Oramo and the BBC SO have been equally impressed: the connection between soloist, conductor and orchestra was dynamic all through, as if difficult one another to higher and higher issues.
There have been many positive particular person moments – a dusky clarinet solo within the second motion, nice work from the bassoons and bass clarinet early within the third; and I can not forbear singling out Antoine Bedewi’s large enjoying within the essential and dramatic timpani half. The lads of the BBC Symphony Refrain (good to see their Director Neil Ferris among the many basses) made an exciting sound within the Cantico finale – not mysterious and disembodied, just like the London Philharmonic Choir within the Albert Corridor Gallery, however gleaming darkly like polished rock.
Gerstein has described the concerto as ‘a symphony with piano obbligato’ (which maybe aligns it, relatively incongruously, with Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie). Nonetheless you view it, it’s a wonderful one-off: what a privilege it has been to listen to two such performances of it on the centenary of Busoni’s demise.
Chris Kettle
