FringeReview UK 2024
BBC Prom 49 Czech Phil/Hrusa Dvorak Cello Concerto, Suk Symphony No. 2 in c Op 27 Asrael
Czech Philharmonic Jakub Hrusa, BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, Kensington
Genre: Live Music
Venue: BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, Kensington
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Hrusa elicits playing of astonishing fire from the Czech Philharmonic. They don’t need to sell the Dvorak, but show it in its truest light. Here, they’re out to convince us Suk’s Azrael is one of the great universal symphonies. And they do. Outstanding.
BBC Prom 49 Czech Phil/Hrusa Dvorak Cello Concerto, Suk Symphony No. 2 in c Op 27 Asrael
Review
In the first of two consecutive visits to the BBC Proms, the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Jakub Hrusa perform Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B minor with Anastasia Kobelinka, and his son-in-law Josef Suk’s towering Symphony No. 2 in C minor Op 27 ‘Asrael’
Directly inspired by his 1891-94 USA tenure where he heard Victor Herbert’s Cello Concerto No. 2, Dvorak’s Cello Concerto has been surprisingly performed less than 30 times here. Like most 19th century composers, Dvorak had hesitated over writing a cello concerto, though he’d written one 30 years earlier.
The question of balance was uppermost, where the cello’s lower notes might get lost in orchestral undergrowth. Dvorak’s response was so skilful – withdrawing lower brass and strings at those points, using a large orchestra like a chamber sounding-board – that Brahms famously remarked he’d have written one if he knew it could be resolved like that.
This performance is in any case special enough. Kobelinka is an expressive player, stretching long lines and winding cantilenas around her powerful lower notes, never used with the dug-in declamatory effect of some, but all of a piece. Where she particularly scores is her joining in the chamber-like sonorities of the orchestra, and duetting with the leader on his violin, to poignant effect.
Famously, Dvorak had been in love with his wife’s elder siter and actress Josefina, and (like Mozart) married her sister Anna faux de mieux. Nevertheless Josefina had retained affection for an early Dvorak folk song ’Leave me alone; (Op 82/1) and when he heard of her illness, and alter death, he quoted from it twice: the second time at her death, he has the cellist duet and respond to the concert master’s violin. It’s an exquisite moment and Kobelinka and Jan Mracek make something remarkable of it.
Elsewhere Kobelinka and the Czech Phil draw on Dvorak’s remarkably varied palette, where the opening allegro plunges into the drama, with the most narrative-like swerves throughout; the spun-out Adagio ma non troppo with the first of those quotes, Kobelinka particularly affecting. She has the knack of both theatrical expressivity in throwing up her bow and holding the cello from her in moments of repose, as if an actor; and yet not creating over-theatrical music. Lines are sung rather than danced or gestured with. Hrusa can elicit magical playing from the orchestra in both works, and the restraint and delicacy, the true collaborative quality, certainly not lacking either passion or panache is what we come away with.
Personal tragedy of a greater kind are the mainsprings of Suk’s Asrael Symphony of 1905-06: both its inception and halfway through a deadly second blow swerved it to an even tighter pitch of grief.
Perhaps this dark vein was always with Suk. His future father-in-law Dvorak cajoled him out of it, sand for a time his palette was lighter yet ever-enriched, particularly by his marriage to Dvorak’s daughter Otilka. Dvorak’s favourite pupil, his life was bound up with father and daughter.
The former’s death in 1904 shattered Suk’s world to a degree and he set about a four-movement symphony quoting from Dvorak’s Requiem (heard here on flutes). He had just started the final movement when Otilka died of a congenital heart condition. It took Suk a year to resume and his musical language was changed yet again.
There is nothing like this work. David Fanning wrote in 1991 of its first western recording (RLPO under Libor Pesek, also at the Proms that year) that it transcended the personal in a wholly unself-regarding manner, and pitched its achievement beyond Mahler. In profundity, there’s no symphony of the time that matches it, certainly, and in its wild-ride finale, a modernism that hints at Schreker, Schoenberg and even the 1920s.
Its power is the more remarkable for its slow build – only its third movement a Vivace is ‘fast’ and that’s eddied in a slow central trio. The work opens in an Andante Sostenuto built with tritones and a soaring arc of grief, yet somehow keeping the personal universal, rather than impersonal. It ends with extraordinary effects on timps including huge thwacks on the bass drum: not so much theatricality but ritual. The Andante which follows builds one quite beautiful melody with a dying fall sustained throughout, leading to the manic Vivace with its eddying centre, ferocious and distorted: little here of the 1903 Scherzo Fantastique’s wonderful tuneful brio but its dark younger sibling exhibits the same mastery at work.
The break in the work called Part 2, pitches an even greater achievement. The Adagio is a portrait of Otilka, and another melody stretches over an arc of disquiet, love and acceptance. It doesn’t last, and the most extraordinary movement of all ends this work. Nominally an Adagio e maestoso its often nothing of the kind. There’s – dare one say it – a thrilling build-up in the strings, and an explosive release as the initial themes return transformed and a demented klezmer-like clarinet dances like a parody of Death’s consolatory angel, skeletal and screeching above it all.
No wonder Suk was catapulted into modernism through grief and innate genius. The work gradually winds down. It’s quite shattering, a paean to transcendent grief, incandescent with longing and no sad and angry consolation, but fighting anything like that all the way.
A final masterstroke before the last climax has an arrhythmic figure on the strings: something he later revisited in piano pieces about Otilka (who composed them too) for his son About Mother. “About Mother’s Heart’ is just such a piece, and here the uneven figure suddenly stops. It’s literally a heart-stopping moment.
After this he never looked back as a composer but never forward again as a man. He never remarried and quietly brought up his son, continuing to play in the Bohemian Quartet he co-founded till 1933, two years before his early death at 61. Suk wrote far less, but each was a masterpiece, including his nearly-atonal controversial String Quartet No. 2 (1910) though mainly long symphonic poems like A Summer’s Tale, The Ripening and Epilogue.
This is the most astonishing – and greatest – Czech symphony. It also established Suk as one of the five greatest Cech composers and a modernist or progressive not out of place with Mahler and Sibelius. Hrusa elicits playing of astonishing fire from the Czech Philharmonic. They don’t need to sell the Dvorak, but show it in its truest light. Here, they’re out to convince us Suk’s Azrael is one of the great universal symphonies. And they do. Outstanding.
