BRNO Philharmonic Orchestra: Sunday Classics
Usher Hall - 09/10/22
One of the joys of Edinburgh life is the series of concerts put on by the Usher Hall, given by guest orchestras from throughout the world, on Sunday afternoons at 3pm. As well as a chance to hear different orchestras and repertoire, it allows a more mixed audience to come and hear classical music live, a necessary experience for the next generation. Evening concerts in general are not child friendly, and these Sunday shows give families, and some older people, the chance to come out in safety to experience this wonderful music in the flesh.
This week’s guests were the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, the Czech orchestra originally founded by the young Leoš Janáček, to bring frequent musical events to the second city of the Czech part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and this concert featured three famous Czech composers, Martinů, Janáček and Dvořák.
However, they started with one of the most quintessential English pieces ever written, the ‘Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Conducted by their Artistic Director, the American Dennis Russell Davies, the orchestra showed us that they can play music from a completely different heritage to their own with consummate ease. This miraculous work, premiered in Gloucester Cathedral in 1910, was a superb opening piece, a luscious meditation for strings, based on a theme by the great Tudor composer, Thomas Tallis. Serendipity had taken me the night before to a concert given as part of the Georgian Concert Society series by the Marian Consort, which had featured two major works by Tallis (see my review in the EMR), so my mind was already saturated with the music of the great 16th century genius. It has always amused me that Vaughan Williams took, as his Tallis theme, a tune from one of the composer’s Protestant works, a setting of Psalm 2 for Archbishop Parker’s 1567 Psalter, a metrical version of ‘Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?’ Apparently, Vaughan Williams associated this theme with Bunyan’s allegory, ‘A Pilgrim’s Progress’, a subject which fascinated the composer, but this part of Tallis’ output was minimal compared to the Latin settings he used predominantly.
The last time I heard the Fantasia live was the sad occasion of the memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral of my friend, Richard Hickox, who had been a staunch supporter of the music of Vaughan Williams, and this memory came back to me as I listened to the Brno Philharmonic playing it so beautifully today. I had not appreciated the complexity of the scoring however – two string orchestras and a solo quartet divided into 27 parts, and I had never consciously noticed the solo viola leading off the central section of the work for quartet, played here by Petr Pšenica. Mr Russell Davies, a pocket dynamo figure on the podium, and, from his biography, a most distinguished conductor, moulded the string sound very sensitively, and established from the beginning a control over the performance which boded well for its success.
The second piece on the programme was Bohuslav Martinů’s Cello Concerto No 1, with Laura van der Heijden as soloist. This work, first performed in Berlin in 1931, and then revised twice, once in 1939 and again in 1955, four years before the composer’s death, was unknown to me, but I enjoyed it very much, especially the slow middle movement. The outer movements were more typical mid-20th century percussive compositions, with lots of fast notes on the cello and a restless feel to the music. However, the Andante Moderato took on a distinctly individual quality, its basically meditative mood interrupted twice by full orchestra outbursts but returning to the main theme (interpreted either as a Moravian chorale or a Moravian folk song) for a tranquil ending. The cello has a long central cadenza, superbly played by Ms Van der Heijden, and she was firmly in charge of her instrument in the breathtaking final movement. This young English cellist (she has a Dutch father) won the BBC Young Musician Competition in 2012 and has recently been signed to Chandos Records. She is certainly one to watch!
After the interval, we were treated to Janáček’s short symphonic poem, Žárlivost (Jealousy), based on themes from his opera ‘Jenůfa’. I have recently been writing about the opera, in which I sang at the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam some years ago, commenting on my failure to remember any of the music, and I fear the same thing happened in this concert. It was all very interesting, lots of timpani and brass, but a definite feel of “sound and fury, signifying nothing!” It may be my dislike of the unpleasant nature of many of the composer’s plots for his operas, but I simply do not “get” Janáček, apart from his lovely ‘Cunning Little Vixen’ which I sang in the Bregenz Festival one year, and adored. Mr Russell Davies and the orchestra played ‘Jealousy’ very well, however.
The main work in the concert was Dvořák’s famous Symphony No 9, ‘From the New World’, and the orchestra played it splendidly. It has been said many times that most famous music is famous because it is very good, and that is certainly the case with the New World Symphony. Despite long acquaintance, it never fails to stir the heart and warm the blood.
Dvořák had been invited to America by Mrs J M Thurber, the musical wife of a millionaire grocer. She asked the composer to head up her new National Conservatory of Music and conduct some concerts. In addition, she asked him to write a symphony for America, an idea which intrigued the composer, as he was beginning to be aware of the songs of the ex-slaves in the south, with their soulful religiosity. There is not much sign of these songs in the symphony, and indeed Dvořák spent a lot of his time in America with the Czech community in Spillville, Iowa, so was still hearing Czech melodies frequently. The ‘New World’ had its premiere in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1893 and appeared in Prague the following year. It was a huge triumph, and soon was heard all over the world, and became one of the most loved of all symphonic works.
I must confess that I had not heard it for some time, so, in a way, this performance by the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra allowed me to come to it almost anew. Of all the popular and familiar tunes, the flute theme from the first movement is the one that most suggests the people and vistas of the young country. The symphony was only written just over a century after Independence, and vast tranches of the country were still comparatively empty. It is impossible nowadays to imagine what somewhere like Iowa must have looked like in 1893, so one can appreciate that the composer was operating almost in a vacuum in trying to express his feelings about America in music.
Whether they are melodies from the new world or old Moravia, there is no doubt that Dvořák was a master of melodic invention, and the consistently wonderful flow of tunes in the 9th Symphony is nothing short of miraculous. The orchestral line up provided by the programme failed to note who was playing the cor anglais, but the musician responsible rose to the task. It was lovely to hear a Czech orchestra playing this music, and, perusing the line-up, it is clear that the members of the Filharmonie are almost exclusively Czech. This is very rare in these multinational times, and the uniformity of the players in terms of nationality surely contributes to the sound of the whole orchestra. The strings were very sweet and the brass blazed impressively, while the woodwind contributed enormously, especially with all the bird calls required.
Mr Russell Davies controlled proceedings very impressively, and the end was greeted with great acclaim. These Sunday guest concerts are an important part of Edinburgh’s musical life and deserve to be better publicised. One thing the Usher Hall could do to improve things is to offer a printed programme. I downloaded one from the Usher Hall website beforehand, and it was very informative, but I seemed to be in a tiny minority. If no one knows what is being played and who is playing it, the experience is severely downgraded. Part of the pleasure of a good concert is to be able to read about what you are hearing. This was a very good concert!
