Proms Saturday Matinee 2 9.08.14: Lapland CO, Hardenberger / Storgårds

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Saturday, 9 August
3.00 p.m. – c. 4.30 p.m.
Cadogan Hall

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Symphony in B , 'Hamburg' (first performance at The Proms)
Sir Harrison Birtwistle: Endless Parade
Honegger: Pastorale d'été
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: Sinfonia (first performance at The Proms)
Sibelius: Rakastava

Håkan Hardenberger, trumpet
Lapland Chamber Orchestra
John Storgårds, conductor

Contemporary music forms a key role in the ensemble's work, and here the group celebrates the 80th birthdays of two major British composers - Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger is the soloist in Birtwistle's concerto Endless Parade, whose dark, maze-like landscape is matched by the languorous vistas of Honegger.

The anniversary celebrations of CPE Bach continue with the spiky, brooding textures of his Symphony in B minor.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

http://www.korundi.fi/in-english/Korundi-house-of-culture/Lapland-Chamber-Orchestra

[jayne lee wilson]

On paper at least, a beautifully conceived sequence... the CPE Bach is in fact his Symphony for Strings Wq. 182/5, for me the most exciting and moving of that set of 6. There seems no reason to call it "Hamburg" individually...

I don't believe I've heard Max's early 1962 Sinfonia before, one of his Monteverdi-Vespers-inspired works... there's a detailed composer's note on the Maxopus website...

[Blotto]

Is anyone able to suggest how early I might need to be to get a Day Seat on Saturday?

There are 150 available from 10 am (all others sold). Do I really need to get there early or is 9.45 / 10 am likely to do?

I fully understand that no-one can be certain but I would be grateful for any informed thoughts. Thank you.

[Serial_Apologist]

On paper at least, a beautifully conceived sequence... the CPE Bach is in fact his Symphony for Strings Wq. 182/5, for me the most exciting and moving of that set of 6. There seems no reason to call it "Hamburg" individually...

I don't believe I've heard Max's early 1962 Sinfonia before, one of his Monteverdi-Vespers-inspired works... there's a detailed composer's note on the Maxopus website...

A tough, abstract piece, and very much of its time: written before Max had begun explicitly exposing his source materials and inspirations.

[Serial_Apologist]

Is anyone able to suggest how early I might need to be to get a Day Seat on Saturday?

There are 150 available from 10 am (all others sold). Do I really need to get there early or is 9.45 / 10 am likely to do?

I fully understand that no-one can be certain but I would be grateful for any informed thoughts. Thank you.

I've always managed to get into the Cadogan proms by turning up an hour before the start - until last year, that is, when for the concert featuring "Pierrot Lunaire" was sold out; we queued outside having to wait for any dropouts, and then it was a panic last second entry with hushed urgings to our seats; I'm not prepared to hang around for 5 hours just in case - looks like I shall have to give this one a miss.

[Blotto]

Thanks for the advice. I wasn't prepared to go any earlier than 10 but I can occupy myself in town until 3.

[jayne lee wilson]

Utterly delectable way to spend a summer afternoon, this sequence of sonic hedonisms from the 20thCentury (CPE Bach given honorary membership for the day)...
Wonderfully world-weary Birtwistle intro, with some sharp comments about the "permanent discontinuity" a la Picasso in his Endless Parade, saying how he loved Beethoven for his unpredictably, but "Beethoven had the disadvantage of tonality, whereas I can do what I like"...

Concert of the Season for me, and the next 2 Cadogan PSMs look good too (30/08, 06/09).
HDs production values - sky-high like the Swifts over my garden. Pure sonic pleasure (like the Swifts too).

[Tevot]

Utterly delectable way to spend a summer afternoon, this sequence of sonic hedonisms from the 20thCentury (CPE Bach given honorary membership for the day)...
Wonderfully world-weary Birtwistle intro, with some sharp comments about the "permanent discontinuity" a la Picasso in his Endless Parade, saying how he loved Beethoven for his unpredictably, but "Beethoven had the disadvantage of tonality, whereas I can do what I like"...

Concert of the Season for me, and the next 2 Cadogan PSMs look good too (30/08, 06/09).
HDs production values - sky-high like the Swifts over my garden. Pure sonic pleasure (like the Swifts too).

Thanks for the hot off the press review Jayne

As it is midnight here in China - I will need to wait until at least tomorrow afternoon to savour the full atmosphere of the concert as was intended

Night Night,

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[jayne lee wilson]

Clemency Burton-Hill described CPE bach's B Minor Symphony, Wq.182/5, as "rather wild", but "rather circumspect" seemed to be John Storgards' view with the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, sensitive but a little cautious, underplaying Carl Philipp's multipolarity, adagio a little too lovely, finale a little too safe. A touch of Incidental Music for The Stately Homes of England here, when what we needed was The Really Wild Show...


But here on HDs, the orchestra felt close, tactile, warm and immediate, in an intimate acoustic. I was drawn in to closer listening, in touch with individual players.

Endless Parade was introduced by Birtwistle himself with sharp wit& wisdom. He described "six musics", cut up and rearranged arbitrarily, as per Cubism - HB had been obsessed with Picasso when he wrote the piece (and recalled putting the phone down on a too-demanding commissioner...). There are many repetitions, but "out of order" in every sense, so - listen in the moment and watch the elements revolve around you, at the still point of a monochrome kaleidoscope. A Symphony of Mindfulness.
Hardenberger owns the piece, with a sense of menacing power barely held-in-check... Storgards' accompanied with wondrous transparency.

Honegger's Pastorale d'Ete was our commercial break, a sweet summer lullaby, a chocolate flake in a golden meadow...
A warm and flowing tempo rubato from Storgards here, solo winds nosing among the grasses of light, svelte strings. Utterly gorgeous, and this was the piece that followed me, softly rocking me, through the rest of my day...

But there was another layer, some tougher meat in this summer sandwich - Maxwell Davies 1962 Sinfonia, what Max has called "a variation on the original [Monteverdi 1610 Vespers] in the way that Picasso's pictures based on Goya are".
4 sharply-focussed, very contrapuntal movements of severe yet compelling melodies, for 5 winds and strings. The Webern of the OP.21 Symphony is clearly Max's master here, especially in the last two movements, the finale an intense Dark Elegy carried by the strings, keening forward to Max's mature symphonic style, with a restrained sense of tragedy at its close.

Perfect complement to Max's Sinfonia, the string-orchestral version of Sibelius Rakastava performed a wistful blessing upon the afternoon, played with austere, chaste elegance by an orchestra in calm command of a wide range of voices, moods and textures.
If only they learn to sauce it up a bit, to discover the shadow-self, the moodswings, the sheer instability, in CPE Bach...


There was an encore but, feeling it to be misjudged in such a perfectly-balanced context, I ignored it and returned to the sunshine and my own summer pastoral.
Minus the chocolate.

[Roehre]

...
But there was another layer, some tougher meat in this summer sandwich - Maxwell Davies 1962 Sinfonia, what Max has called "a variation on the original [Monteverdi 1610 Vespers] in the way that Picasso's pictures based on Goya are".
4 sharply-focussed, very contrapuntal movements of severe yet compelling melodies, for 5 winds and strings. The Webern of the OP.21 Symphony is clearly Max's master here, especially in the last two movements, the finale an intense Dark Elegy carried by the strings, keening forward to Max's mature symphonic style, with a restrained sense of tragedy at its close.
....

PMD's Sinfonia and Webern's Symphonie are almost twins

[teamsaint]

If you fancy some musical stimulation, do yourself a big favour.
Get this up on iplayer, soak it up, and read Jayne's comments , either before or after.

An absolute peach of a concert. Wish I had been there. Great little interview piece with HB, and an interesting exchange between CBH and PMD. Really lovely musical contrasts, and as Jayne said, the Honneger was a bit special.

I wonder if I tend to bring some wrong expectations along when listening to Honneger?


Anyhow, Must have been a a great concert, CBH didn't annoy me !!

Enjoy.

[jayne lee wilson]

Yes TS, CBH's nervous dialogue with the Harrison Hedgehog was one of the highlights...

And I think Andrew (usually hard to please...) liked it as well...

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/aug/11/proms-matinee-2-lapland-chamber-orchestra-storgards-review

How I miss my old sparring-partner Edashtav for an event like this. Probably write us off the page with it too.

[bluestateprommer]

A very interesting PSM indeed, rather bi-polar in its swings between the three 'conventionally tonal' works of CPE Bach, Honegger and Sibelius and the then (perhaps still now) avant-gardism of Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies. While in principle, those swings might have seemed overly calculated in a 'compare and contrast' way of thinking, it actually kind of worked overall. If nothing else, it shows the versatility of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra and John Storgards. A few rough edges, but nothing to inhibit the quality of music-making. HH was terrific in Endless Parade, even if listening to it now didn't leave me quite as intrigued when I heard the commercial recording years back.

I did note also that CB-H seemed a bit nervous when introducing Sir Harrison Birtwistle, but if you want to be semi-kind, you can chalk that up to self-awareness on CB-H's part, perhaps the mild realization that she might be getting in a bit over her head with a legendary modernist British composer, lacking the understanding of modern music (if also the hyper-over-enthusiasm) that a Tom Service would command. However, she had the sense to let Birtwistle start talking, and just let him go. I remember that Sir Harrison (I'm not comfortable enough, even on a keyboard from the USA, to refer to him as 'Harry') also had a bit of fun playing with Petroc's brain last year at the PCM concert with the Moth Requiem, but also that Petroc was a good sport about it.

There was an encore but, feeling it to be misjudged in such a perfectly-balanced context, I ignored it and returned to the sunshine and my own summer pastoral.

Good grief, why? If the orchestra went to the trouble of preparing the encore, it's kind courtesy to hear them out. For the record, the film that John Storgards referred to is a 1943 Finnish costume drama, Katariina ja Munkkiniemen kreivi, which apparently is something like a Finnish version of a romance across class lines, i.e. young aristocratic count loves milkmaid, and vice versa. The oboe solost whom Storgards mentioned is Markku Moilanen. He did fine, one short squawk aside. The 'Romance' by Nils-Eric Fougstedt appears to be something like the 'hit number' of the film.