BBC National Orchestra of Wales plays Grace Williams, Saint-Saens and Elgar under Jaime Martín with Akiko Suwanai

 

Last night’s concert in ADDA, Alicante was given by BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jaime Martín with Akiko Suwanai as soloist. On the face of the published schedule, they were just two works, the third violin concerto of Saint-Saens and Elgar’s Enigma Variations. A little short, one might think… Well think again!

The evening’s programme scheduled a third work, a substantial piece as well. It was Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches for string orchestra. At nearly twenty minutes, this rendered the concert’s length substantial at least.

Written in 1944 by its Welsh composer, Sea Sketches predates Britten's Peter Grimes, which, of course, includes the now separately performed Sea Interludes. Sea Sketches by Grace Williams comprises five movements that explore the sonorities of a string orchestra, as well as giving an impressionistic portrait of the sea in five different pictures– in wind, in song, with mysterious sirens, breaking on the shore and becalmed in summer. The textures of Grace Williams’s writing for strings stressed the coolness of a windy beach, with neo-classical flavours hardening the language of late Romanticism. One might think of Britten’s string writing when listening to Sea Sketches, but Grace Williams in the piece speaks to an audience with her own voice and communicates her own personal feelings. Grace Williams died almost fifty years ago, and her music richly deserves a wider audience.

Akiko Suwanai was soloist in Saint-Saen’s Violin Concerto No. 3. Her playing was simply breathtaking. From the work’s quiet opening and then into the opening allegro, she gave everything the work needed. If Saint-Saens was anything, he was a composer of technical mastery, and in this concerto there is both real dialogue between the orchestra and soloist and, indeed, that dialogue is always audible. The composer’s handling of the orchestra is nothing less than expert. A listener is always aware of its power to dominate, always conscious of its lines of argument, but also confident that none of the soloist’s statements will be drowned.

The slow movement was pure delight after the energy of the opening. Its longer lines allowed Akiko Suwanai to show the lyrical side of her playing, and she used the opportunity to give a beautiful performance, stressing the elegance of this music. The final allegro is again full of energy and Akiko Suwanai’s playing reproduced the communication of the first movement. It was a superb performance of the spectacular music. Akiko Suwanai gave the audience a little unaccompanied Bach has an encore. As she played alone, it was interesting to note how attentively even the orchestra listened.

Elgar’s Enigma Variations is so well-known seems unnecessary to say any more about it. But the work as a whole is not as well known as the Nimrod variation, which is often played stand-alone. It is decades since I last heard a live performance of the entire work, and I was struck by the extreme dynamics, the composer demands.

A challenge of variation writing is to keep an audience interested in the familiar. Elgar’s solution in Enigma is to present the theme and then fourteen variations which exploit the full range of orchestral possibilities. Each variation is ostensibly a portrait of an individual and the composer ups the pace by keeping the variations short, except of course, for Nimrod, which is always too short for an audience from an audience's point of view.

What had turned out to be quite a long concert finished with a Russian encore, Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla Overture. It was played with real gusto and enthusiasm, as was everything else we heard. What a delight, also, to hear a British Orchestra playing two works by British composers on a foreign tour.

Pimchas Zukerman plays Elgar with Orchestra National de Lyon under Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider in ADDA Alicante

When writing reviews, the pressure to express opinion often leads to overstatement. It is a position. I usually try to avoid, and I do so by concentrating on the positive aspects of the object under review. I will do the same here.

To say that everyone went away happy from this evening of Elgar and Brahms would be an understatement. They had been treated to an outstanding performance by an outstanding violinist. They had also been delivered a going-away lollipop in the form of the ever-popular Nimrod variation from Elgar’s Enigma to round off the evening.

Pinchas Zukerman is now seventy-five years old. He has been making music in public for over five decades of his life, and if anything, he seems to get better with time. There are few pyrotechnics to see in his playing. But when the eyes are closed, the true force of expression becomes clear in all of its colours.

The Elgar Violin Concerto that started this evening was beautifully played. Its complexity of argument, where orchestra and soloist seem regularly to exchange roles and material, seems like an intellectual process at times, an intellectual process that is conducted purely via emotion. This Elgar concerto is a thoroughly modern piece, dressed in nineteenth century form, as evidenced by the unconventional techniques the soloist is directed to use. Brahms, and indeed Mendelssohn are here, but so is the idea that violinist and orchestra combine and compete in dissecting a musical argument. This is no simple showpiece for a soloist to fill with emptiness.

And the communication between artist and orchestra this evening between Pinchas Zukerman and the Lyon Orchestra was superb. The soloist even joined in with the first violins here and there to keep himself busy. His tone throughout was a joy to hear, as was his obvious understanding of the problematic score. Elgar was always a showman, but his lack of personal confidence always persuaded him to be retiring. He considered himself an outside, an underdog who was always trying to gain entry to an establishment that he felt shunned him. It is rather strange, contradictory even, given that his music is now seen as thoroughly “establishment”. Personally I hear this dichotomy in the music, as exemplified so often at the start of his pieces, which sound is if we are entering into the middle of a conversation that was already underway before we arrived. It’s as if the composer is apologising before he has said anything!

After the interval, the Lyon Orchestra played the Symphony No. 1 of Brahms. It’s an orchestral standard, which, surely, most full-time professional orchestra have played many times, and can probably render convincingly from memory. It can be a challenge, not least for a member of the first violins who lost a string. She proceeded to play through the piece as if the problem did not exist. Remarkable and congratulations!

Personally, I don’t have much to say about the Brahms Symphony, except that if it had been written in the age of recording technology, Johannes Brahms would have been labelled a plagiarist. History, however, might mark the influence of Beethoven in his music as “inspiration”. It was an inspiration, as we know, that caused the composer, great difficulty, and perhaps this symphony had to be written to unleash creativity that otherwise would have found no voice. 

Another great ADDA evening.