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For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

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For the Sunday Times (SL)

When Glenn Gould said he’d take the music of Bach with him to the proverbial desert island he failed to specify which Bach. It’s fair to assume, though, he did not mean all of them.

In a concert sponsored by – whom else? – the German Embassy, the Chamber Music Society of Colombo ducked and weaved and selected no fewer than four members of the prodigiously musical clan. And I confess I looked long and hard at the poster before committing to an entire evening on the Germano-classical scene. Concert items by Bach, Bach, Bach and Bach might well end up being so much musical champagne – and over two hours, even for a die-hard Bach fanatiker/in, that champagne could very easily go flat.

JC (‘I’ll be’) Bach’s overture to Artaserse was straight out of the CMSC playbook. Goodly baroque – even Handelian – zest in the ‘Allegro molto’; sheep safely grazing all over the pastoral ‘Andante’; the solid pomp of the ‘Presto’. Dust flew, players grinned. It was good and they knew it. (There is sometimes a risk of Bach being more exciting for the players than for the listener. But we’ll worry about that later.)

The wind section snuck off like naughty schoolboys hoping to bum a fag behind the bike-shed, and left the strings to wrangle the Sinfonia in F major, the ‘Dissonante’.

In defence of WF Bach (or perhaps not), his dissonances are not of the most aggressive stripe. The moniker of the piece does everyone the favour of advertising the experimental angle (as they said in Yes, Minister: ‘Always dispose of the difficult bit in the title.’), but the ‘Dissonante’ ain’t, frankly, all that. The closing ‘Minuetto’ is relatively violent, but the middle movements are essentially courtly, howsoever (en)harmonic. (Generally, it’s not so much about dissonance at all, but tonal shift.) Even at its most tonally rambunctious WF’s contrapuntal journeyings through the further reaches of the baroque-classical transition is hardly Beethoven’s Gross Fugue. No fault of the orchestra, who played it with their usual zeal; but the ten generations succeeding WF (‘wunderkind’? ‘wild-child’? what?) Bach have come to expect more and more – or less and less – from dissonance, especially when prominently billed.

Of course, no-one actually wants dissonance. It’s a kinky and circumstantial thrill which – as too many C.20th experiments proved too well – only makes sense against a basically harmonic structure.

That said, too much sonance is like a cake made entirely of icing, and it was good in this context to see the CMSC throw a little lime juice in the sugar syrup.

To wit: JS (‘who’s the daddy?’) Bach’s secular cantata ‘Non sa che sia dolore’. I’m not sure secularity is where the Bach of Bach’s strengths lay, and certainly this number – BWV 209 – does not come off well in comparison with, say, the Mass in B minor or the Christmas Oratorio.

Oboist Yoav Weiss stole it from the opening bars of the ‘Sinfonia’. His playing was absolutely exemplary, the tone flawless (none of that duckishness that is all but ineradicable in a double-reed), the pitch exact, running the upper and lower registers of the instrument without batting an eyelid. It was like having mercury poured in your ear. (Which I haven’t, by the way; but it sounds good.)

Aside from using a variant scoring for oboe (usually flute), the CMSC executive had taken the decision to augment the backing band from string quartet to sextet (plus ‘cembalo’ continuo). The reason for this quickly became apparent.

Preshanthi Navaratnam’s soprano has an operatic clout that, musically speaking, the Bachs (all of ‘em) rather predated. Not to mention the fact that the Germans (all of ‘em) would have seen anything Italienisch as sehr, sehr delicate and frightfully sensitive (bordering on the poofy), and expected a delivery to match. Navaratnam’s tone was too dark, too heavy, had way too much vibrato (even though she was clearly trying to contain it). She might have made a great Donna Elvira; but that wasn’t the task at hand (cause for pause, perhaps, for whomever does the tasking)… Sure, you wouldn’t entrust a Bach cantata to a boy treble; but somewhere in between would have been good.

Similarly, Bach himself may not have been too subtle in his setting of the Italian text (Classical-allegorical stuff about a traveller on the sea, lest you were interested), but one got the impression he was subtler than Navaratnam made out. Even with concessions to what the programme astutely tagged ‘the awkward Italian libretto’ it could not be said that she handled it well. In fact, for about the first minute, I was convinced she was singing in German. Knowledge of foreign languages is not an absolute prerequisite for a singer; but Navaratnam seemed fundamentally uncomfortable with the words, as though reading them for the first time. A ponderous emphasis on almost every word did not, alas, bear fruit in terms of diction. Orchestra and voice were not comfortably one – the band seemingly too loud and urgent, as if in compensation for the weight they were carrying – nor were the voice and oboe interplays nearly cheeky enough (also insufficiently florid was the continuo in the recits, where the extra pizzazz was sorely needed). The arias seemed to go on for ever, and were, in the word(s) of one learned colleague, ‘boring’.

Wherever possible Weiss provided a delicate, tidy counterbalance, and whenever he got a moment to himself it was clear the unequal contest was all over bar the shouting.

More JS after the break, with the famed Concerto for 2 violins in D minor, the German baroque’s equivalent of a dance-off. The two (or ‘2’) violins in question were Satish Casie Chetty and Shogo Kanamori. Gifted players both, and perhaps Casie Chetty had the lighter, more mellifluous action because he had the higher, more mellifluous line; but it seemed, from the outset, as if the duet was not so much imbalanced as stylistically split, and there were moments when their ‘discourse’ sounded like it was happening at cross purposes. Casie Chetty’s playing was more spirited (not to suggest inaccuracy), Kanamori’s more mathematically rigorous (not to suggest dullness). Both approaches work, even in Bach; just not together.

Things cohered as the piece progressed, but the duettists were never really far enough out from the body of the ensemble, a risk when their lines feed in and out of the full texture, and (even) in a very light orchestration (nine string players in all), the cellos – shock! horror! – were a little heavy, and even slightly out of tune. Nor did the momentum develop quite as much as perhaps it should. But it peaked in the ‘Allegro’, and in the run to the end the bowing-arms were moving in a regimented and determined ballet that would have put Korean border guards to shame.

[NB It’s difficult to marshal an ensemble without a conductor, I appreciate; but the audible sniff is not a good way to start numbers. (‘And what if someone else sniffed at just the wrong moment?’ quoth Miss December.) Likewise, while eye-contact is essential for unit cohesion, it reached such a level of camp theatricality in the Sinfonia (WF) that my companion commented dryly perhaps the orchestra should make more of it. They should not.]

JC (‘told you’) Bach returned to close out the programme with his ever-so-slightly-crazed Sinfonia no.6 in G minor. Putting the JCB into JC Bach (‘We’ll Move Your Earth’) this piece came with all the belly-fire we have come to expect from CMSC concerts, and it is this kind of performance ethos that has helped to reclaim period music from the mausoleum.

The ‘Andante’ had a pulsing, clock-maker’s progress, the melodic motifs and flourishes drawing themselves organically out of the rhythmic-harmonic structure. (It could have been tempting to take this too slowly, but wisely they did not.) Then the ‘Allegro molto’ – and this they did, the bows shimmering like coked-up hummingbirds. The texture built and built, to an impressively full noise from so small a group.

It was widely noted that the second half fairly zipped along, a testament to the right balance of Bachs great and small, and some astute variety in textures and tones. In the end, the fact that the composers were all members of one extended family was all but forgotten. Leading the bow at the end, the CMSC’s Artistic Director, Lakshman Joseph de Saram, announced, ‘We’re not going to play any encores, because we’re just… spent.’ Indeed, and quite right. And, perhaps, because another bit of Bach might just have been pushing it.

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More or less as run in the (SL) Sunday Times.

Mozart’s Sonata in D Major is a lightish confection, perhaps slightly more icing than cake, from an era when pianos were still quite piano and you didn’t need a 15” hand-span to play the big numbers. The piece, written in the composer’s relative maturity, is also, in itself, quite scaled back, and Pommier played it, such as is possible, according to the manner of the day (i.e. feet nowhere near the pedals).

It was a consummate rendition, neither metronomic (contra my boyhood piano teacher) nor excessively flamboyant, and as a thunderstorm opened up outside the alternate turns of vibrancy and quietude preserved us under the umbrella of tranquillity.

Not so with the ‘Appassionata’ (Sonata no. 23 in F minor). Even Beethoven reckoned this monumental and heroic piece to be one of his best works – and it is PDG. From the noble, march-like principal tune to the pounding of the keys (NB appassionata not to be attempted on first dates) and the trilling in the ivory stratosphere, Beethoven gave his full, brawling, elemental mad-browed might to the storm now raging outside. As the thunderclaps landed bang on the chords, it ceased to be clear who was providing whom with the ‘rolling accompaniment’. In Pommier’s fade-to-pianissimo ‘Allegro assai’ I scribbled: ‘the two avenging soldiers fall together in the rainstorm, lie on their backs looking up at the clearing skies, and, finally, rest in peace.’

That said – and perhaps it was the hour-glass shape of the venue, or just where I was sitting – what I had taken as the pianist’s exemplary restraint in the Mozart now seemed just a touch too cool. By the end of the ‘allegro ma non troppo’ Pommier could (should?) have been hitting the piano with a sledgehammer – but wasn’t. No matter: the piece still rightly got a standing ovation.

It is hard to believe that Liszt’s Sonata in B minor is separated from the ‘Appassionata’ by only fifty years. But both indicative and evocative of the particular brand of untrammelled Romantic genius that Liszt typified, the pedal (the important one) was down and everything was going full whack (everything except the nicely atmospheric storm, of course, which had passed without so much as a by-your-leave).

Huge – almost symphonic – in scope, and incorporating, in its massive single movement, touches of Puccini, Wagner, Mendelssohn, even Gershwin, the virtuosic B minor seems to condense not only the whole orchestra into two hands, but the whole of C.19th musical history – half of which hadn’t even happened yet.

Needless to say, this is a ridiculously difficult piece, even by the standards of the international star circuit. Simply daring to play it is half the show (just reading the sheet music is a challenge beyond all but the most battle-hardened pianists), and it was amazing to see it done with such gliding dexterity – not least from a man with the physique of a Welsh baritone/shot-putter.

There’s something slightly frantic and Tom-and-Jerryish about Liszt’s virtuosity, though. Jerry hits Tom with frying pan (crash), Tom sees stars (twinkle twinkle), Tom trudges home, tail dragging on the ground (minor slow bit), Tom plots revenge (low growls), Tom sets trap (short mischievous bursts), Jerry comes sauntering along (ominous crescendo), then start again in the next episode.

To accuse Liszt of pure stunt-making would be harsh; but there are moments when extreme showmanship can make a piece seem… less profound… than perhaps it actually is. It’s like, say, Thomas Pynchon novels: colossal, not frankly 100% convincing, and more beloved of the critics than of the broader literate populace (who prefer Dickens). The B minor is, undeniably, a showstopper. But personally I’d have closed with the more satisfying Beethoven.

Pommier, inevitably, wasn’t let off before the audience had extorted two encores: a trifling little central-European dance number that he played with almost dismissive effortlessness; then a shameless and totally brilliant rendition of Chopin’s Minute Waltz, so fast it ought to have been renamed. Genuinely impossible, without sight of the keyboard, to ‘see’ how this could be played by human hands.

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Jean-Bernard Pommier and CMSC chief Lakshman Joseph de Saram are discussing launching an appeal for a concert grand, in readiness for the opening of the new National Performing Arts Theatre. This is a tremendous idea that deserves support (please direct cash donations to me c/o The Sunday Times – in unmarked, non-sequential bills – and I’ll see that it gets to the right place).

Nor – I hasten to add – was it ill grace that prompted Pommier to comment, gently, on the Goethe’s piano. It’s not concert standard, is all (basically, there are a couple of strings missing, but it’s also not sufficiently tuned), and in a national capital, with visiting musicians of Pommier’s calibre, that’s a poor show.

Published version – incl. minor abridgements – here.

I appreciate it must be tiresome – not to say slightly unnerving – listening to middle-aged boffins frotting over high-grade music, and that it’s not much better when the middle-aged boffins are actually in their 20s. But what to do? That’s the job.

The CMSC’s recording-quality performance of Mozart’s Il Re Pastore overture had me salivating and (I checked) my heart actually racing. This is what CMSC does best – pieces that are logistically small-scale, but technically and emotionally demanding – and what puts them in a league of their own is a simple matter of unity. Cohesion. Plenty of spirit, too, of course; but mere élan is worthless without discipline – as faithful followers of French rugby will attest.

Can’t say I warmed to the Hindemith, though (cue jokes about what happens if you let a viola-player run the show). Some of the Acht Stücke had more zip than others, but, matters of non-resolution and atonality having moved on in the intervening 80 years, this once-radical stuff now seems just a bit passé and wilful: like looking at photos of your old haircuts. An unrelaxing 20 minutes for the musicians, the eight pieces were nonetheless tidily rendered – this being very much an instance of Ben Franklin’s ‘hang together or hang separately’ dictum – even if the confidence of the delivery was generally in inverse proportion to the number of players involved. Serious kudos, though, for a serious tackling of a serious work.

If Hindemith stück it too us rather less than one might have feared, Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso in D min opened on a far more aggressive note (a D) than one would ever have expected. Weary and unimaginative reviewers like to remind folks that ‘baroque’ actually means ‘misshapen’, and this piece – one of 12 ‘harmonic inspirations’ – recalled a bold and adventurous phase in the wild Western musical tradition. Scored for two violins and a cellist, plus continuo, the concerto strained to heights of tension and suspense that are totally beyond metaphor; cellist Dushy Perera played phenomenally in ‘Allegro’; and such was the soloists’ attack and vigour that their deputies fled their desks.

CMSC’s composer-in-residence, Stephen Allen, was also conductor-in–situ for the Colombo premiere of his Forest Paths song cycle. Musically, the work sits somewhere between John Adams’ harmonic-rhythmic motivation and the intense lyricism of Benjamin Britten (who produced his own good stuff about turbulent seas). Kind of a soundtrack for a wistful-Canadian-poet film that will never get funding.

The text for the soaringly operatic vocal part was Allen’s own, ‘loosely depicting the moods and changes within a forest’. Loosely, alas, was about right. From Mary Anne David’s fragile delivery I identified ‘glorious day’ and ‘sunshine’, ‘I love you’ and ‘little else’. In short, we couldn’t hear the words for the trees.

There is nothing wrong with David’s pitch, and she has a wonderful sustain; but her tone is old and clouded. Unfortunately many of the most beautiful moments in the suite – incl. some elegiac Ethel-Smyth-style string melodies (no relation) – occurred while David was not singing. The ecstatic garlanding that followed was just plain embarrassing.

If the interval was designed to pour oil on troubled waters, Handel’s ‘Overture’ to Alessandro tossed a match onto the resulting millpond. It’s not GF’s greatest work, it must be said, but it was worth it just to watch Othman Hassan Majid at second violin. The man’s action is so smooth you’d think he was miming: the sound seems to just emanate from somewhere nearby.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 39 in G min (‘Il Mare Turbito’ – you sea?) started superbly, but flagged in the slow middle sections. The second movement was particularly untidy, and the violas conspicuously fluffed their few opportunities to shine (every joke about violas is true, by the way). I’m not saying the CMSC were complacent, but they are adrenaline junkies, and they need to regulate the IV.

For whatever reasons, though – a feisty ‘Allegro di molto’; a phone ringing in the audience – the team rediscovered their mojo in the closing movement, which was of truly professional standard. Righteous applause, and even a few whistles. The Symphony Orchestra doesn’t get whistles. Not on the good days, anyway.

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Two footnotes, which I am inclined to start appending to every review:

1) There is a clear rule that you don’t clap between movements unless the performance has been so spectacular your hands take matters into their own: it distracts the musicians and breaks the mood. This rule stands even when your favourite Aunty is singing solo.

2) When you’re asked to turn off your phone, it’s not a polite request from some over-sensitive-musician types. It’s part of the contract of your attendance. If you’re expecting a call, stay home.

Expurgated version here.