SCO, 26/11/2021
Mahler : Blumine
Mahler (arr. Britten) : What the Wild Flowers Tell Me
Berg : Kammerkonzert (Kolja Blacher, violin; Roman Rabinovich, piano)
Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Joseph Swensen
Before the start of the concert, I overheard one audience member relating to her companion that she had no idea what tonight's programme was to be, but seeing "Viennese" in the concert's title, assumed it was bound to be something light and pleasing. She must have got a bit of a shock, although really, "Viennese Hothouse", as the concert was fully titled, should have evoked something quite other than the Strauss family.
She would at least have been eased into matters by the sweetness of Mahler's Blumine, played with nicely swooning strings, although Peter Franks's solo trumpet was a little too distant for my liking. After Mahler discarded Blumine from his 1st Symphony, it disappeared, until it was rediscovered in a manuscript copy of the score used for the symphony's second performance, found at Yale University in 1966. The following year, Benjamin Britten conducted its first performance since Mahler's time, at the Aldeburgh Festival. Britten's interest in Mahler went back some way; twenty-five years earlier, he created a chamber-orchestra version of the second movement of Mahler's monumental 3rd Symphony which, in its original format, was subtitled "What the flowers in the meadow tell me". The easy charm of this "Tempo di Minuetto" (which is the indication that appeared on the final version of the score) reminds us that for all its scale and grandeur, the 3rd Symphony still belongs very much in Mahler's Wunderhorn period, and Britten's pared-down version underlines that even further. There was particularly eloquent playing from Robin Williams (oboe) and Maximiliano Martin (clarinet) as well as the leader Sarah Kapustin.
Of the three composers who make up the core of the so-called Second Viennese School, Berg remains the most approachable, because he never completely relinquished a vein of lyricism in his music. Nevertheless, some pieces are easier than others, and the Chamber Concerto is one of the pricklier works. Berg here is drawing closer to his teacher Schönberg's theories of serialism. He would never immerse himself in it as thoroughly as his fellow-student Webern did, but the Chamber Concerto is written using extremely precise mathematical relationships that govern virtually every bar of the work. Nevertheless, Berg's characteristic lushness of scoring comes through, although the orchestration appears sparse, with a solo violin and piano, and thirteen wind and brass players. The soloists tonight took full advantage of this, each in his own way producing richly melodious sounds, powerful and reverberant from Rabinovich, and glowingly expressive from Blacher, whose violin had an exceptionally beautiful tone. Swensen and the wind-band completed the picture with a highly persuasive interpretation.
[Next : 27th November]