FringeReview UK 2024
BBC Prom 23 Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances, Busoni: Piano Concerto
BBC Proms
Genre: Live Music
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, Kensington
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
It’s not often Rachmaninov’s final work, his 1940 Symphonic Dances features as an overture, but paired with just one work – Busoni’s 70-minute 1904 Piano Concerto, played by Benjamin Grosvenor – the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Edward Gardner bring an electrifying, percussive justice to both. But even more, the emotional punch – matched with scale and hyper-romantic ambition – is never obscured by sheer fireworks.
Review
It’s not often Rachmaninov’s final work, his 1940 Symphonic Dances features as an overture, but paired with just one work – Busoni’s 70-minute 1904 Piano Concerto, played by Benjamin Grosvenor – the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Edward Gardner bring an electrifying, percussive justice to both. But even more, the emotional punch – matched with scale and hyper-romantic ambition – is never obscured by sheer fireworks.
Gardner and his forces ensure both works emerge gleaming and above all clear: if a huge percussion section can ever be described as translucent, this is it.
I’ve often wondered if Rachmaninov might have been better off with a Symphony No. 4 in g minor (mainly) and Piano Concerto No. 5 in A minor? Naturally their current titles (the latter is of course the Rhapsody, and I’m not the first to suggest it) could serve as subtitles. Rachmaninov might have served himself better and his reputation and this work not fallen into comparative neglect (in the UK at least) till the 1970s.
Fokine did inspire Rachmaninov to contemplate a set of dances, but nothing came of it. Aaron Copland’s Dance Symphony, his No. 2 in fact, was a precedent. Eugene Ormandy commissioned and gave the first performance of the three-movement Symphonic Dances and in its 35-minute scope, it broadens the scope of his previous work, the coolly classical Symphony No, 3 in A minor.
The expansive first movement features a famous saxophone solo (Martin Robertson) perhaps denoting an emigre Russian lament in an American accent – though Glazunov wrote a late Saxophone Concerto in Paris in 1934. It all begins with an ominous expectant quiet then jaggedly introduces themes analogous to Mephistopheles (so it’s suggested) and the rhythms of the whole work are defined, often in syncopated themes of threes and eight-notes.
Rachmaninov’s preoccupation with the Last Judgement, the Dies Irae, present in his Symphony No 1 (which he thought destroyed after its disastrous premiere) emerges here, with a Lisztian bravura and a theatrical panache reminding us of his three fine operas. There’s calls on the woodwind, especially fine throughout the evening, and the overall pull of regret balances the sheer energy.
The second movement with a melting oboe solo (Fergus McCready) here never lapses from the overall pulse, and leads into the finale. David Gutman amongst others refers to this movement as a struggle between Death (the quotations from the Dies Irae) and Resurrection (quoting from the composer’s All Night Vigil) and the overall sense is of Rachmaninov unleashing something peculiarly Russian which only America allowed him to do. Gardner and his forces bring a clarity that’s never cool and a temperature that for all its heat shows crystalline orchestration.
The forces are as some put it “demented” and the catastrophic crash at the end analogous to Ravel’s La Valse and its glittering Viennese cataclysm. The themes alternate and rise shrieking. The demons called up in Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1, then gibbeted in its reception, seem not so much laid to rest as given a wailing valediction at the end of Rachmaninov’s career. The timp crashes are inordinate, inconsolable and like the last trump. It’s an astonishingly detailed yet driven performance.
Not managing to attend (for domestic reasons) Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto on August 5th 1988 with Peter Donohoe, the BBC SO and Mark Elder, is something scarred on me, only alleviated by the recording. Though, exactly 36 years to the day (no-one commented on the exact anniversary) Benjamin Grosvenor’s performance allayed that a bit more. It also falls on the centenary of Busoni’s premature death at 58.
Extraordinarily scaled, not so much a concerto as a five-movement ‘Italian symphony’ according to Busoni, it’s been likened to a series of Liszt tone-poems. Bar Liszt’s Tottenhanz (Death Dance) for Piano and Orchestra element – Rachmaninov and Busoni so divergent were united in this obsession – it does seem more a symphony than concerto, with obligato piano. A bit like Berlioz’s Harold in Italy with piano substituting for viola.
It’s a farewell too to Busoni’s romantic past. An unquiet ruminative introduction like Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 gives way not to a tender theme but an explosive bravura of octaves by Grosvenor marking the greatest entry of any piano concerto according to several. I wouldn’t disagree. Donohoe’s had introduced a power-driven opening of grandeur and definition.
Grosvenor’s, just as defined in its way, is more quicksilver and you expect an almost fleeter traversal. In fact Donohoe’s was at 68 minutes, the fastest recorded. Paradoxically Grosvenor’s with Gardner, always an airborne fleet conductor brings it in at a few seconds over 70.
The acoustics in the normally superlative Gallery (especially stage right over the organ) which allowed the orchestral detail to bloom and never clutter, didn’t quite favour Grosvenor. But he surmounted them clearly: the BBC Sounds conferred a different acoustic and it’s really worth hearing, as I did, straight after the live performance.
It’s a movement too of contrast and opening themes that recur. No place to go into all of these but they’re memorable, surpassingly late-romantic and prefigure in certain sharp turns the modernist Busoni was to become. There is a certain mix of dispassionate classicism, even baroque nomenclature (in the third movement that Sorabji for one adopted).
For 15 minutes the soloist moves in and out of focus. The next movement, the first of the two Italian movements is marked pezzo giocoso. It’s a catchy manic fairground piece, though wait till the fourth for that. It’s also a 10-minute cascade with a more reflective central section and introducing material Grosvenor plays subtly with: it’ll come back long after the bravura finish of this one.
The third movement Pezzo serioso is in three parts, and suffice to say this gargantuan edifice, a mini-concerto of 20 minutes, is in fact more tone-poem where Grosvenor sits out, accompanies almost as an orchestral pianist (like the one in the Rachmaninov) and occasionally takes over. It’s the philosophical heart of the work – not an adjective normally applied to a piano concerto or symphony.
Busoni loathed Wagner but his own writings, however opposed, show a polymathic cast of mind too: in other words extra-musical in some ways to effect musical revolutions. But it’s entrancing and Gardner holds lucent textures together when they could easily feel turgid. Some of the great oration-like themes that land at the finale are really struck out here by pianist and orchestra. It’s engrossing and never feels either rushed or turgid – which it can easily in the wrong hands.
The 12-minute fourth movement a All’Italiana: Tarantella is one of those earworms crashing in its manic bravura and like an Ensor painting of carnival, not far removed in time and akin to Busoni’s garish vision. It ends after terrific pile-driving from Grosvenor in a series of timp crashes, reminding us how powerfully both works rely on percussion.
What to say of the 15-minute Cantico finale and introduction of two men’s choirs, the Rodolfus and the LPO’s? Situated as Busoni states out of sight, this time in the gallery (yes we could peek a look) they sound magnificent, and some of us could hear them clearly enough (BBC Sounds do an excellent job too) singing from the same work of Aladdin that Nielsen (in 1919) set: a German text in praise of Allah.
This, an edifice to eternity is where the work’s been heading; and after his frantic work in the fourth movement Grosvenor takes a rest through most of this. The themes introduced earlier and the astonishing hymn to an eternal dawn which doesn’t sound too romantic, sung as it is (the text is hyperbolic but not appalling, the sentiment noble enough) rings out as finally. And as if suddenly woke with a prod, Grosvenor springs to life and scurries to the finish with terrific aplomb as if it’s perfectly natural to come in at that moment.
It’s one of the most exultant closes of any work. And this masterpiece, difficult and expensive to stage, let alone perform, really needs introducing as a great occasion every few years.
Astonishingly, Grosvenor brought out an encore like a small pearl of melancholy after the triumph. Siloti’s transcription of Bach’s Prelude in B minor. Siloti taught Rachmaninov: a neat touch and exquisitely played, bringing us back perhaps to the young classicism Busoni later proposed.
Whilst elsewhere racists burn down hotels and scream their Islamophobia, it’s bracing to wonder what they and most of the media miss: a hymn praising Allah resounding in the very British Albert Hall (and not now sounding too blasphemous, a possible sensitivity militating against its performance for a decade, I’d guess). A paean to inclusivity, to pantheistic idealism and the new dawn Busoni’s heirs still await.
