Prom 33 - 10.08.17: Sibelius, Grieg, Schumann and Hindemith

[gradus]

I recall -perhaps mistakenly - that Klemperer talked about a (then) recent recording of Mathis when interviewed on Face to Face. If so, it's never been released and may be in what remains of EMI's vaults. PH and OK being contemporaries.

[Serial_Apologist]

[/FONT][FONT=Helvetica]I came to love Hindemith’s orchestral music through the Chandos Tortelier series ( a different, sharper, cleaner sound - Gallic-Germanic Hindemith, perhaps), and R3 concerts associated with it, like those at the Barbican Weekend from which I taped much.
Perhaps there’s a parallel with my beloved Martinu here….

Fascinating observations on Hindemith there, jayne.

When I first came across the old BBC Radio 3 forum I asked a question that remained unanswered, regarding the singularity of the Austro-Germanic classical-romantic inheritance as inscribed in a certain predominant harmonic emphasis towards the major/minor diatonic, wondering if this was an endemic feature more strongly inscribed within that tradition, long-term and pre-dating the historic transition in that direction and away from the old church modes accomplished in the first two decades of the 17th century, and exemplified in the musics of Monteverdi in Italy and Schutz in Germany. Hindemith's mature stylistic consistency was among the easiest of the modernists to assimilate for a young person in the early 1960s such as myself, eagerly seizing on what the 20th century had accomplished and where the music was going; and one thing that for me was immediately apparent in that harmonic language was the strong modal stress in certain intervallic choices and uses of parallel open fifths and fourths that seemed to place it apart from that of most of his German contemporaries, such as Weill and of course the Schoenberg school, and closer to the French tradition, with its open-minded attitude to harmonic practice and liberal borrowings from past ages. Your Martinu connection strikes me as significant in this respect, given the influence of Roussel on the Czech master.

It is all-to-easy to think of German and Austrian folk music as most typically represented by its brass band military music and the yodelling traditions in its vocal music - both of which emphasise the simple diatonic harmonic gestures Mozart, Beethoven (to a lesser extent maybe), Schubert especially, Bruckner and Mahler inscribed into their idylllic musical image-making. For me, last week's COTW, looking back on the early development of polyphony, set the record straight on this and other matters, showing as it did just how international, if one is allowed to induge in an historical abberation for a moment, the modal approach to music for both secred and secular performance had been much earlier than the folksiness most familiar to tourists, including the composers included of what for want of better description one may think of as, erm, Germanic (?) origin.

[Bryn]

Recorded in 1957, and still available for under a fiver incl P&P:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bartok-Stri.../dp/B00000DOIE

Or for even less, pro rata, and newly remastered 2014, in this box of boxes:

[edashtav]

TWO CONTRASTED WORKS BY SIBELIUS:

Contrary to the announcement on R.3, the world premiere of Luonnotar did not take place in the vast acoustic of Gloucester Cathedral in September, 1913, but in Gloucester's more intimate Shire Hall, a venue thought to be more suitable for secular music.

The Shire Hall had been enlarged and equipped with electric lighting since the previous visit of the Three Choirs Festival in 1910. We're told that the Hall was full, and subsequent reports suggested that there were 897 in the audience.

BBC publicity has suggested that Luonnotar is a "late" work by Sibelius. I regard it at a product of his middle period since it is roughly contemporary with works such as the 4th symphony and The Oceanides, pieces that exhibit more advanced harmonies and an acute awareness of expressionism and impressionism. I can't resist quoting the Daily Mail's review following the premiere in Gloucester "Mme. Ackte sang it with passion which seemed remarkably intense for so remote a theme as the world's birth out of waste air and water." I wonder if the writer lived to hear Darius Milhaud's La Creation du Monde.

Onwards, to the Prom performance. Lise Davidsen brought a powerful voice and plenty of emotion to her interpretation. Hornspieler hash asked for less vibrato, and I can understand his plea- but to be fair, in at least one phrase, Lise did reduce her full-on vibrato to a cool, limpid, tightly- focussed stream. However, the story of the creation of life, "remote" from us moderns, was in its time, to use all the wrong words, earth-shattering, and for it to have come from an egg on Luonnotar's knee must have shocked and stirred her more than a little. Davidsen was on top form and Storgards and the BBC Philharmonic provided confident and idiomatic support.

This fine performance confirmed an important thrust of the BBC Proms: to identify and programme great music that through difficulty or sheer bad luck doesn't appear frequently in routinely concerts. Luonnotar tests any soprano to her limits and the piece poses difficulties in comprehension for audiences: whilst the piece was long in gestation, Sibelius completed it in just a few weeks before the premiere in September, 1913. He cut and pasted the intended text in a ruthless manner so that, I believe, even Finnish people find the story difficult to follow. Nor was there time for the composer to review his unusual orchestration and perhaps, in his accustomed manner, make some rough edges smooth. In cinematic terms, this is the composer's first cut, and written for Mme Ackte, who by all accounts, could sing anything. (Even in the Concert in the Shire Hall, she progressed to sing the big soprano aria from Samson and Delilah with Saint-Saens nonchalantly conducting the orchestra from the piano on which he'd just played Mozart's Bb Piano Concerto before she ended the evening by dispatching the final scene of Richard Strauss's Salome.

I don't think we know what "Dr" Camille Saint-Sean's thought of Sibelius' radical new work, although I doubt if he heard it as the musical " Promised Land", the title of the arch-conservative's new mini-Oratorio that the he "conducted" two days later. The Telegraph opined that "nobody liked [the oratorio]" whilst a local critic noted that Saint-Saens gave help with entries neither to the double chorus nor the orchestra. I see Camille as "Mr Cool" , the Huw Watkins of his time.

Back to the Prom and the Karelia Suite which is "early" Sibelius. Storgards had the measure of the piece: the first movement was played at a steady pace but it retained a jaunty, positive mien and some touches of folk music sounded a little as if by Dvorak out of Karelia. The intermezzo was saturated with what Sibelius had learned from Russians , particularly Borodin and Tchaikovsky and it wasn't until the cor anglais darkened the timbres that the real Sibelius peeped out. The BBC PO was in superb form in the finale, Alla Marcia. Storgards pointed the string tune and cunningly used some portamenti to give it not only a folklore quality but also ensured that it was full-spirited and replete with joyful uplift.