RSNO, 21/05/2022

Ravel : Valses nobles et sentimentales

Gershwin : Piano Concerto (Louis Schwizgebel, piano)

Rachmaninoff : Symphony No. 3

Royal Scottish National Orchestra

John Wilson

The Valses nobles et sentimentales were originally written in 1911 as a piano piece, with reference to Schubert's similarly named collections of waltzes, and then orchestrated, with Ravel's inimitable genius, the following year, ostensibly for use in a ballet.  The ballet has long been forgotten, the music has thrived.  Ravel in the orchestra is, as always, fascinating to watch as well as to hear, his attention to the least little detail producing enchanting results, and John Wilson clearly enjoys them.  The first waltz swung beautifully, but subsequently, the slow waltzes tended to be a little too slow, and that long pause before starting the last waltz broke the flow of the piece somewhat.

Gershwin was apparently very keen on getting lessons in orchestration from Ravel, but when Ravel enquired about Gershwin's earnings, in order to fix a fee for the lessons, and discovered just how much the already highly successful songwriter was earning, he remarked that maybe he was the one who should be taking lessons from Gershwin.  Certainly, he was as much influenced by Gershwin as Gershwin was by him, as can be heard, notably, in his own two piano concertos, which were created just a few years after Gershwin's. 

However, Gershwin's instincts were sound; like most songwriters and Broadway composers, he rarely orchestrated his own music - it was a matter of time, as much as anything else - until he started writing 'concert' works, and even Rhapsody in Blue, which is generally considered the first of these, was orchestrated by Ferdy Grofé.  While what Gershwin does with the orchestra is undoubtedly a significant part of his overall sound and musical character, there are things that could have been handled more subtly had he known just how to do so, and the Piano Concerto is a case in point, because there's no doubt Gershwin is somewhat heavy-handed with the percussion.  

Louis Schwizgebel has a wonderfully delicate touch, and brought a dreamy, poetic quality to Gershwin's score.  My problem - and it may have been simply where I was sitting - was that there were substantial periods during which I could barely hear the piano.  I could see he was playing, but the orchestra completely covered him, and it seemed that a rather beefier touch would have been better suited.  Because I was struggling to hear the piano, notably in the outer movements, much of what makes it such an enduringly popular piece passed me by.  The slow movement, where the piano is not so often faced with the full weight of the orchestra, was a delightfully lazy, wistful reverie - Sunday in the park with George, as it were - very nicely delivered by soloist and orchestra alike.  Schwizgebel gifted us with an encore, in which we could admire his touch without impediment, and in a particularly appropriate choice of one of Erwin Schulhoff's 5 Jazz Studies.

Turning to Rachmaninoff after the first half of the concert might initially seem like taking a step back into the past, but his 3rd Symphony was written in 1935, and there's nothing retrograde about Rachmaninoff's handling either of his thematic material or of his orchestra.  There is a moment near the start of the second movement, when the lower strings are playing pizzicato, and the harp is rippling away, when I was suddenly reminded of the Cavatina, from Rachmaninoff's student opera Aleko, nearly forty years earlier, but most of the first movement has been pointing the way forward to his last and greatest orchestral score, the Symphonic Dances, while the third movement's main theme - it's a rondo, fundamentally - has an epic Hollywood sweep and excitement to it, admirably conveyed by Wilson and the orchestra.  Konrgold's ground-breaking score to The Adventures of Robin Hood was just around the corner.  

It's also particularly interesting that this symphony, written for an American orchestra, should be possibly Rachmaninoff's most Russian-sounding orchestral composition, something Wilson also conveyed with complete clarity.  He seems to have a fondness for pregnant pauses, which I found somewhat exaggerated at times, and which made the last movement seem longer than the first, which it is not, but on the whole this was a fine performance, with much detail in respect to colour and timbre which made for engaging listening.

[Next : 28th May]