BBCSSO. 18/04/2024
Abrahamsen : Three Fairy-Tale Pictures from The Snow Queen
Rachmaninoff : Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Stravinsky : Le baiser de la fée
Sir Stephen Hough, piano
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ryan Wigglesworth
Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen is the BBCSSO's current Composer-in-Association, and this is the second work of his I have heard with this orchestra. The music is drawn from Abrahamsen's 2018 opera The Snow Queen, based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale, but although the title is "Three Fairy-Tale Pictures", it's essentially in one movement, and there's mostly a sense of a journey, rather than successive scenes. Notably, Abrahamsen does not wish his audience to be able to associate the "Pictures" with specific scenes from the opera or story, and that detachment from the concrete identity of a dramatic narrative enhances the impression of a sort of tone poem, rather than of an orchestral reduction of the opera. The only other piece of Abrahamsen I know is the one I heard eighteen months ago, Vers le silence, and the sound-world is not dissimilar, sliding planes of glacial beauty, with flickering patterns appearing here and there, building up to a stormy climax, then receding into ethereal stillness.
Ostensibly, Rachmaninoff's Paganini Variations have no connection with the stage, but within a year of its composition, Mikhail Fokine had approached the composer with a view to creating a ballet on it, with a book playing on the once-popular legend that celebrated violinist Nicolo Paganini had sold his soul to the devil in exchanged for his unparalleled virtuosity. Created for the Royal Ballet, the piece has since disappeared - though I have seen film of a Bolshoi creation on the same subject, with the same music but, I believe, a different choreography - and the music has been put to more abstract use by other choreographers. The presence of the Dies irae plainchant in the score has tempted some to speculate that Rachmaninoff had that story in mind when he wrote it, but it was hardly the first time he'd used that medieval tune, not to mention that he would do so yet again in the Symphonic Dances which followed, so I think that the Rhapsody is nothing more and nothing less than what it purports to be, a theme and variations for piano and orchestra. It is, at any rate, always a joy to hear, arguably the greatest of Rachmaninoff's concertos. I felt that Stephen Hough let the helter-skelter perpetual mobile of Variation 15 get away from him a bit, which unsettled the next couple of movements, but the famous 18th was very nicely judged, sensitive without being overly sentimental.
Le baiser de la fée is, if ever there was one, a cursed ballet. Based on a late Andersen tale, distantly related to The Snow Queen in subject, it was a commission from Ida Rubinstein, who wanted a ballet to mark the 35th anniversary of Tchaikovsky's death. It's unsettling to think of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky in the same bracket, they seem worlds apart, yet Stravinsky greatly appreciated Tchaikovsky's music, and Baiser draws extensively, and lovingly, on a substantial number of smaller, usually piano pieces, which sometimes appear very much as Tchaikovsky himself might have orchestrated them, and sometimes in the distinct, spicy, angular colours of Stravinsky's own style. Therein lies the problem; for a composer who had already proven his abilities in the field of ballet, and working with the music of another similarly tried and tested master of the genre, there's something singularly unchoreographical about Baiser. Nijinska created the original version, it has disappeared. Balanchine, naturally, made a version, I haven't heard of that one appearing regularly even on the NYCB roster. Ashton and Macmillan both made versions, I've never seen the former, and the latter is, reputedly, logistically impossible. I have seen a couple of other versions, also disappeared since. There's a disaffect between the music, and the odd and chilling story which, frankly, ends badly for all concerned. If you add that to the inherent difficulty of Stravinsky's music, notably in terms of timing, you get a score that is usually better listened to than seen danced.
As he often did, Stravinsky made a concert suite, the Divertimento, which is more often heard, but Wigglesworth gave us the full score tonight. The horns were not having their best night, with some unseemly sounds coming from that section, but the trombones were having fun, and there was a good deal of very beautiful playing from the clarinet, who has much to do in this score, while the strings balanced skilfully between the kind of lush sweep you find in The Sleeping Beauty, or the symphonies, and the crisp spikiness of Dumbarton Oaks and other neo-classical Stravinsky scores. Petrushka lurked in the barrel-organ sounds of the village fête, and the ending vanished into a chilling silence, bringing us full circle back to the icy world of The Snow Queen where we had begun the evening.
{Next : 20th April]