Prom 15: Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (26.07.22)

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

19:30 Tuesday 26 July 2022
Royal Albert Hall

Leonard Bernstein: Candide – overture
George Walker: Variations for Orchestra
Samuel Barber: Violin Concerto
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F minor

Johan Dalene (violin)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Jordan de Souza (conductor)

All is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds! That’s the motto of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, but the swinging trumpets that launch its overture are just one side of the musical American Dream – whether it’s the soaring nostalgia of Barber’s sunlit Violin Concerto (played by former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Johan Dalene) or the urban energy of George Walker’s altogether edgier 1970s classic. And then Jordan de Souza and the BBC Symphony Orchestra spin on a dime and plunge into Tchaikovsky’s autobiographical Fourth Symphony: terror, triumph and one man’s life-or-death struggle with the force that he called Fate. In other words, the ultimate symphonic thriller.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Please excuse my insertion of the BBC's blurb. It will probably appeal to some, but for me, it wreaks of Play School and Saturday morning Breakfast.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Please excuse my insertion of the BBC's blurb. It will probably appeal to some, but for me, it wreaks of Play School and Saturday morning Breakfast.

And it doesn’t credit Voltaire which frankly is breach of copyright….

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

And it doesn’t credit Voltaire which frankly is breach of copyright….

But as it's only the overture...

[richardfinegold]

Is the conductor a descendant of the American March King? Perhaps an Iberian branch of the Family?
Tchaikovsky Fourth is one of my favorite works. I was playing the recording by Bychkov and the Czech PO last weekend but my long time favorite is Bernstein/NYP. It’s nice to see that Russian music composed over a century prior to the present conflict has been able to return to U.K. concerts

[crb11]

Please excuse my insertion of the BBC's blurb. It will probably appeal to some, but for me, it wreaks of Play School and Saturday morning Breakfast.

Once one dismisses the rest of all possible blurbs, one finds that this is the best of all possible blurbs.

[Master Jacques]

The blurb-writer sadly missed the point that Dr Pangloss's "All's for the best, in this best of all possible worlds" is continually held up to ironic ridicule, as much in Bernstein's Candide as Voltaire's original. The major subsidised arts organisation seem to be farming these things out to sixth-form interns.

Covent Garden are easily the worst. I won't forget the blurb for Oedipus Rex which began: 'The young and confident Oedipus leaves Corinth, to escape a terrifying prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, but then ... [spoiler alert] ...' You then had to click on the 'spoiler alert' button, to get to another button which asked you whether you were 16 or above, on clicking which you were allowed to see the rest of Stravinsky's thoroughly shocking plot!

[Ein Heldenleben]

Mewh

The blurb-writer sadly missed the point that Dr Pangloss's "All's for the best, in this best of all possible worlds" is continually held up to ironic ridicule, as much in Bernstein's Candide as Voltaire's original. The major subsidised arts organisation seem to be farming these things out to sixth-form interns.

Covent Garden are easily the worst. I won't forget the blurb for Oedipus Rex which began: 'The young and confident Oedipus leaves Corinth, to escape a terrifying prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, but then ... [spoiler alert] ...' You then had to click on the 'spoiler alert' button, to get to another button which asked you whether you were 16 or above, on clicking which you were allowed to see the rest of Stravinsky's thoroughly shocking plot!

All true but the overture is optimistic isn’t it ? In fact that’s possibly part of the problem with the musical . The music is so brilliant that the bitterly dark side of the novella is somewhat undermined.

[Master Jacques]

All true but the overture is optimistic isn’t it ? In fact that’s possibly part of the problem with the musical . The music is so brilliant that the bitterly dark side of the novella is somewhat undermined.

You are quite right of course, that the musical certainly sweetens Voltaire's pill, but the humour can be equally dark and savage. Even 'Glitter and be Gay' paints a devastating picture of a bipolar existence, hanging on desperately for dear life. That's what good operetta does!

The trumpet motif in the overture continually blasts out Dr Pangloss's ludicrously optimistic "any questions?", which gives it a tongue-in-cheek quality at the start. I'd say it was energetic, jolly and witty, of course, but the smile is only ironic. I'm scratching my head a bit to work out what we might take for "optimism" in this music - at least until the heart-on-sleeve finale of the operetta, "making our gardens grow". That comes as a moving relief after the OTT horrors of the action.

It also, I think, undermines any sense of anything like the American Dream, by suggesting movingly (as does Voltaire) that the best thing anyone can do is be thankful for their lot in life, however humble, and stay put. Which brings us back to that fatuous blurb...

[Ein Heldenleben]

You are quite right of course, that the musical certainly sweetens Voltaire's pill, but the humour can be equally dark and savage. Even 'Glitter and be Gay' paints a devastating picture of a bipolar existence, hanging on desperately for dear life. That's what good operetta does!

The trumpet motif in the overture continually blasts out Dr Pangloss's ludicrously optimistic "any questions?", which gives it a tongue-in-cheek quality at the start. I'd say it was energetic, jolly and witty, of course, but the smile is only ironic. I'm scratching my head a bit to work out what we might take for "optimism" in this music - at least until the heart-on-sleeve finale of the operetta, "making our gardens grow". That comes as a moving relief after the OTT horrors of the action.

It also, I think, undermines any sense of anything like the American Dream, by suggesting movingly (as does Voltaire) that the best thing anyone can do is be thankful for their lot in life, however humble, and stay put. Which brings us back to that fatuous blurb...

The problem is I’ve only seen the complete work live once ( Simon Russell Beale National Theatre ) and the few recordings I’ve heard ( Bernstein , Originak Cast ) don’t include all of ( Comden and Green’s ?) words, so it’s difficult to be categoric . I also get impression that productions happily rewrite a lot of the book.

The impression I got from the National production was that it didn’t have the absolutely brutal feel of the book - the execution of Byng , the Lisbon earthquake , the ladies having their buttocks sliced off, Pangloss reduced to a toothless syphilitic shell. Maybe all that was in there but it didn’t register with me much.

If Candide has a motto it is of course the realist Martin’s “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” which in the book has a much more flat neutral feel to me than the hymnal “Make our garden grow . Though it’s a fine distinction. The thing is even very dark musicals (Sweeney Todd) send you out with a spring in your step and whistling the tunes in a way that Tristan and Isolde or Wozzeck singularly fail to do. They are essentially an optimistic art form. And although Bernstein had a melancholy strand in his personality and in some of his music this isn’t the work that brings that to the fore .

[Master Jacques]

The thing is even very dark musicals (Sweeney Todd) send you out with a spring in your step and whistling the tunes in a way that Tristan and Isolde or Wozzeck singularly fail to do. They are essentially an optimistic art form. And although Bernstein had a melancholy strand in his personality and in some of his music this isn’t the work that brings that to the fore .

We'd have to differ about melancholy here: surely the bipolarity of 'Glitter and be Gay' - more manic still in its canonic treatment in the Overture - indulges that in spades?

Without spending too much time off-topic, I find your thought that musicals (or operettas, or comic operas - differences here are semantic) are "essentially optimistic" a crucial idea for debate. When Offenbach, for example, makes Public Opinion - we would call her "popular perception" - the "muse" at the centre of Orphée aux enfers, he puts socio-political moral cynicism at the heart of his art. There's absolutely nothing optimistic here about his view of society, or art, or anything else!

Does a hummable tune stop us thinking? Surely not. Of course, just as Brecht complained that Weill's eminently hummable songs took the political edge off his Threepenny Opera, Bernstein's tuneful - very 'European operetta' - score for Candide does much (as you say) to sweeten Voltaire's pill. But the nasty pill is there, all the same. Operetta is for cool, intellectual sceptics, while through-written opera tends to obscure socio-political pessimism through music. I think Wozzeck is a superb example of an opera which is far less hard-hitting than the play from which it's drawn: the lush beauty of Berg's music gilds the horrors.

I'll pass on Sweeney Todd, which merely makes me want to slit my wrists. But I'm sure we'd agree that Candide - whatever else it does - puts two fingers up to the American Dream!

[Ein Heldenleben]

By musicals I mean the Broadway and West End musical not operetta. Both musicals and operettas have a strong satirical strand don’t they? I’m thinking of the Pajama Game, How to succeed in business , Anyone Can Whistle, Merrily We Roll Along. But they just don’t have that vicious dark side you see in Wagner surely? Mind you , you can spin an optimistic ending to Gotterdamerung , as in the recent Covent Garden production , if you put your mind to it,

Yes Candide does put two fingers up to the American Dream - one that always slightly skated over its somewhat chequered history. Getting back on topic no one does pessimism like Tschaikovsky …

[Master Jacques]

By musicals I mean the Broadway and West End musical not operetta. Both musicals and operettas have a strong satirical strand don’t they? I’m thinking of the Pajama Game, How to succeed in business , Anyone Can Whistle, Merrily We Roll Along. But they just don’t have that vicious dark side you see in Wagner surely? Mind you , you can spin an optimistic ending to Gotterdamerung , as in the recent Covent Garden production , if you put your mind to it,

Yes Candide does put two fingers up to the American Dream - one that always slightly skated over its somewhat chequered history. Getting back on topic no one does pessimism like Tschaikovsky …

I'm not sure we come out of the great, tragic works of art - in which category I'm sure we'd both include Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony as readily as the 5th and 6th - feeling "pessimistic". Doesn't this symphony - or Tristan or Götterdämmerung for that matter - send us out into the street both humming the tunes and feeling more vibrantly alive than we did before. They somehow sort out and order the complexities of life.

Whereas Candide, The Merry Widow or Threepenny Opera send us out that little bit more wary of that shadowy figure standing behind the next lamppost. More wisely alert, perhaps, but less confirmed in our sense of the glorious future of humanity. Great comedic art tends to have that effect.

(I can't myself see any essential difference between these musical stage forms, by the way, whenever or wherever they've been written. Despite a great waste of ink, no academic or critic has yet successfully managed to define any of them - the best ones break all the local rules anyway, and in the end "it's all opera"!)

[Maclintick]

A good, old-fashioned, crowdpleaser. The 21-year-old soloist in the Puccini-esque Barber concerto deserved the adulation of what sounded a young-ish Proms audience, and all the better for that. The orchestra were obviously enjoying themselves in the Tchaikovsky, which is a surefire hit in any half decent performance. Tonight’s was more than half decent. The George Walker variations sounded merely gestural, & inoffensive...

[Alison]

I’ve only just realised there is no cymbal clash on the final chord of the Fourth.