Bach, Hartmann & Gorecki @ the BBC Proms

Bach / Respighi
Tre Corali (Three Chorales) – No. 1: ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’

Thomas de Hartmann
Violin Concerto

Górecki
Symphony No. 3, op.36, ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’

Joshua Bell (violin)
Francesca Chiejina (soprano)

BBC Symphony Orchestra
Dalia Stasevska

An intriguing programme as Proms audiences have come to expect from the Ukrainian-born Finnish conductor married into the Sibelius clan and no stranger to alternative musical worlds. Last year her debut Platoon album with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Dalia’s Mixtape, saluted new ways of listening that have ‘renewed the symphony orchestra for a digital age.’ Tonight, on the other hand, diversity took second place to a more consistently devotional or meditative vibe. Stasevska began with a rarity, one of Respighi’s obscurer transmogrifications of Bach organ music, following it up with a belated UK concerto premiere. Only the third piece was in any sense familiar to the Proms audience. 

Respighi’s Bach is usually directly preoccupied with colour, more so than with the projection of line or mood. In this case his intention seemed unclear. The soft, grainy swathes of string tone meandered pleasantly enough, bassoon doubling just about audible lower down, the whole shaped with care by the musicians.

What to make of the music of Thomas de Hartmann (1884-1956)? After ‘Russian’ training (the aristocratic de Hartmann was a student of both Arensky and Taneyev), few composers have been more insistently itinerant. Nor are de Hartmann’s life and work easily disentangled from the peregrinations of his sometime associate, the eccentric Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher and fabulist G. I. Gurdjieff. Long represented in the lists by co-written miniatures associated with Gurdjieff’s sacred dances and devotions, de Hartmann’s bigger scores are only now starting to break cover. Those I’ve heard fuse the meditative, prematurely ‘holy minimalism’ on display in his piano pieces with a short-winded late romanticism. His orchestration at least is exquisite, reinforcing the impression that one is listening to a series of expert cinematic cues whether wanly pastoral or epic and brazen. The composer, whose 50 plus actual film scores were credited to an imaginary Thomas Kross, is at his best when settling into a quiet rapture not entirely earned. There are parallels with Alan Hovhaness’s ‘Mysterious Mountain’ Symphony, sub-par Vaughan Williams and Morricone in nostalgic mood.

Certainly, the Violin Concerto could not have wished for a greater champion than Joshua Bell who has already recorded the music with Stasevska and the hard-pressed musicians of the International Symphony Orchestra Lviv (INSO-Lviv). Bell thinks we’re dealing with a masterpiece. Perhaps. Sara Mohr-Pietsch in the programme booklet called it ‘devastating’- to this writer a ludicrous assertion, not least because so much of it sounds like pastiche. The two-and-a-half minute third movement is a ghostly minuet and trio, a genre piece with unaccountably Scottish or possibly Hungarian tendencies. And, another imponderable, is anything in it specifically Ukrainian? That the Concerto sounds markedly ‘Jewish’ in places is no accident for music premiered in 1947 but written several years earlier in Nazi-occupied Paris. The audience went wild for it or, more probably, for its champion: Bell retains his implausibly glossy good looks as well as the sweetest of sonorities above the stave. The encore was of the fake, pre-prepared variety involving the orchestra in a superfluous, finally rather sickly fleshing out of a familiar Chopin Nocturne. The arrangement was credited to tonight’s soloist by the BBC on air. The closing stages of the first two movements of the Concerto had been accompanied by mobile phones.

After the interval the absolute stylistic single-mindedness of Henryk Górecki struck all the more forcibly. His work arrived at the Proms as recently as 1993 when Old Polish Music launched a mixed programme given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Jerzy Maksymiuk. Only in 2005 did his most famous composition, the ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ follow, the sole item in a Late-Night Prom in which the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra was conducted by David Atherton, a long-term advocate. The score was heard again when Osmo Vänskä and the BBC Symphony Orchestra were joined by Ruby Hughes, but its wider fame has not done much to boost the visibility of the rest of the oeuvre. Even in 2013 its trajectory was to some extent derailed by intrusive clapping. More than ten years on a large part of the Proms audience habitually disgraces itself with a welter of noises off. This Symphony is by no means the easy listen its detractors assume it to be, the relentless repetition scarcely softened in the first movement’s slow canon by the absence of dissonance. On this occasion the movement ran for some 25 minutes. Starting with four double basses playing at the threshold of audibility and retreating into silence, the last thing such music requires is a round of applause but that’s what it received. The central movement is one of a tiny handful of ‘classical’ utterances to which Nazi atrocities can be linked without strain. Plainly however we deceive ourselves if we restrict its reach to Gestapo headquarters in wartime Zakopane. It may be a reflection of the perilous situation in so many corners of the globe that respectful silence gradually took over. The Nigerian/American/Guildhall-trained soprano Francesca Chiejina was clad in angelic white, luminous in every sense, producing a more soft-grained vocal quality than I have previously heard applied to this score. In lieu of the almost hectoring commitment of early Polish exponents she offered beauty of sound and a cool consoling intimacy that probably worked better in the broadcast than live in the distant corners of what is a very large hall. With one arm hieratically raised she projected a sympathetic stage presence, not that I can vouch for her Polish. There were suspiciously few consonants. As in the Concerto, where Stasevska employed a long Adrian Boult-ish baton not in evidence elsewhere, balances were expert and there was a welcome refusal to wallow or dawdle.