When viewing the new season for the DMH concerts I felt that, despite my knowing neither conductor nor soloist, the opening concert of confirmed favourites, Schubert, Vaughan Williams and Mendelssohn was bound with this orchestra at least to bring pleasure to most. In the event it did a great deal more to this listener. Very soon I judged that I was listening to some very special performances of works which I thought I knew well, like for instance Schubert’s Symphony No.5.
Now before I go any further, I have an admission to make. It is that perhaps I refer to a particular conductor of my youth rather too much when setting a standard by which to judge the present. However, in this instance I cannot refrain from referring again to Sir Thomas Beecham, an unforgettable conductor and whom I heard a number of times in the 50s at the end of his life. It was he who introduced me to the then novel idea that music was there to be enjoyed rather than worshipped as if in church and it was in a Prom concert of his that I heard this Schubert symphony for the very first time. I suspect a large number in the Albert Hall that night were also hearing it for the first time since then only the last two of the composer’s symphonies were thought weighty enough for regular performance. However, I was enchanted and as a performance have never quite heard its equal for releasing the lovely sense of young genius awakening. A little later Beecham recorded it and he was said to have demanded rehearsal time in excess of the norm to get the lightness of touch and phrasing in the music. The result was a recording which I play whenever I need cheering up and if you can’t shape a phrase lovingly so that it floats, forget about conducting it. Equally if you think it an early trial run for the composer’s 9th Symphony you are also advised to leave it alone. Just a few years ago a very fine conductor of our era tried to make that case with the result that the music’s youthful spontaneity simply disappeared.
Which as the reader may well guess is leading up to saying that the other night I thought I was listening to Beecham such was Chloe van Soeterstede’s conducting and the playing of this marvellous orchestra. It had felicity after felicity. Throughout the concert I found myself watching the conductor’s expressive left hand encouraging the shaping of a phrase, the result of which was any number of moments in which the orchestra , and the woodwind in particular, had this listener positively drooling with pleasure.
And much the same could have been said about the Italian Symphony after the interval. It was simply so full of life and elegance, with the final Saltarello having a brio that brought the concert to an exhilarating finish. Throughout it was to be particularly noticed the gain that is to be had in this repertory with high quality orchestras from sitting the second violins opposite to rather than with the first violin section. Since I have wandered down memory lane once, why not a second time! The very first time I heard Beethoven in the concert hall was with this orchestra in 1952 in the last concert Wilhelm Furtwangler conducted in London. The final work was the 4th Symphony which has a particularly exciting passage in the last movement involving the two violin sections tossing between them a theme like a tennis
ball. Years later I laid hands on a recording he had made earlier with the Vienna Philharmonic. Alas, it had no such effect and I assumed either my memory was flawed or it illustrated what many said , that the conductor was at his greatest in the concert hall rather than in the recording studio. I think now that there is a simpler reason. The recording was in mono, made before the world of stereo recording took over!
By now readers will be wondering why there has been no mention of the work that separated the two symphonies. Had I been lulled to sleep by the pastoral beauties of The Lark Ascending ? Anything but! Indeed, I was lost for words, not least because of the superb programme notes of Richard Bratby which in a way say all that needs to be said about this wonderful work. I quote: ‘The Lark Ascending is something unique – a supremely difficult violin showpiece without a trace of superficial glitter. Poetry, purity and expressive beauty of tone are all.’
Well said, indeed. At long last, the unique greatness of this composer is being recognised, and not just in this country either. Some years ago Andre Previn introduced The Tallis Fantasia to Vienna and some musicians were so impressed that one of them asked him if the composer had written anything else! Previn is reported as wryly replying, ‘ Yes, 9 Symphonies!’
I had my own moment of truth the other night. My memory may be fallible but I suddenly wondered whether I had ever heard this work in a live performance. In addition, I was quite sure I had never heard of the violinist Leia Zhu. Well, I have now and suffice to say I thought her performance revelatory. On the evidence of this debut in Leicester she is already an artist who digs deep into the nature of the work she is playing. Here one was not listening first and foremost to a virtuoso but to a player for whom quality of sound was more important than anything else. For me in a way it was like listening to the inwardness of the work almost for the first time and I realised that perhaps in recording this work one runs the danger of fiddling balance to make it the violin concerto it is not. True on this occasion I found myself having occasionally to strain to hear the violin, so quiet was the occasional pianissimo but it felt absolutely right in the way it established the spiritual depth of the music. With the orchestra and conductor also at one with the wonders of this work, let my son who has not entirely followed his father’s taste in music have the last word. ‘Gosh that was beautiful!’
The Diary of a Leicester Concert-goer 