Modern British Concerti
* Britten: Violin Concerto, op. 15
* Veale: Violin Concerto
Lydia Mordkovitch (violin), BBC Symphony Orchestra/Richard Hickox, cond.
Chandos CHAN9910 TT: 69:57
Summary for the Busy Executive: D' ye ken John Veale?
Britten's concerti haven't yet attained the popularity of his other
orchestral works. With Britten apparently safely enshrined in the Temple
of Classics, however, performers have begun to explore the darker corners
of his catalogue. The very early and surprisingly profound Double Concerto
for violin, viola, and strings recently appeared on Erato 3984-25502-2, for
example. Britten himself led a Decca recording of his violin concerto way
back in 1970 with Mark Lubotsky as the soloist. That's the recording I
had known, and I must say that it led me to seriously underestimate the
work. The concerto's formal innovation emerged, but that's really the
most obvious thing about the piece. Hickox and Mordkovitch better the
earlier performers by miles.
Britten wrote his concerto in the late Thirties and revised it twice
(both times amounted to tweak and polish) in the Fifties. There's often
a political component to Britten's music -- sometimes overt, sometimes
buried deep -- and the concerto is no exception. The first soloist, the
Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa, remarked on the strong Spanish flavor
of the music. Undoubtedly, Brosa knew more Spanish music than I, and
Britten's recording did nothing to bring out the connection. Frankly,
Brosa's remark puzzled me. Hickox and Mordkovitch hook onto this Spanish
spirit, at least in the first movement, where we hear passages of deep
elegy, much like the third-movement lament of Britten and Lennox Berkeley's
collaborative suite Mont Juic, explicitly inspired by the Spanish Civil
War. Indeed, this recording supersedes the composer's own. The formal
mastery of the concerto -- its unique, somewhat odd shape -- strikes with
an even greater force, since the performance joins it with great feeling.
The first audiences and critics remarked on its wit. The finale, for
example, is a massive free passacaglia, which Britten sustains for roughly
fifteen minutes. One doesn't normally associate passacaglia with concerto,
since the variations tend to extreme brevity. You would think that would
limit the soloist's elbow-room. This is merely one surprise the composer
pulls off.
Yet, while I can acknowledge the concerto's ingenuity, I'm struck far
more by its intensity. The scherzo second movement (the movements are
all played without a break) brings the grotesquerie of Shostakovich to
mind. Britten and Shostakovich admired each other's music, but I don't
know whether Britten had heard Shostakovich's scores as early as 1938, when
he began the composition. Both composers share a fondness for satirical
pastiche and even for the bizarre, although this last tendency shows up
more obviously in Shostakovich. Then there's the common influence of
Mahler. The point is, I suppose, that their mutual admiration very likely
stemmed from the similarities of their artistic personalities. Despite the
japes and the bravura of the work, elegy strikes the dominant note, all the
more surprising in a work which has no formally-designated slow movement,
further evidence of Britten's mastery of symphonic rhetoric.
Before this CD, I had never heard or read the name of John Veale, much
less heard his music. Veale belonged to that "lost generation" of British
composers -- Alwyn, Lloyd, Arnold, Bush, Rubbra, Reizenstein, Stevens,
Simpson, and so on -- all British moderns committed to tonality and all
pushed to the outskirts of critical notice when Sir William Glock took
over musical programming for the BBC. The history, as usually told (and
perpetuated to some extent by Lewis Foreman's otherwise very good liner
notes), gives fodder to the anti-serial, anti-avant-gardistes who see
things in terms of a dark conspiracy to stamp out the True, the Good,
and the Beautiful. It seems to me a fairly naive notion. Composers go
in and out of notice all the time. Far be it from me to spoil a good
story or even a good conspiracy, but I have to point out that some tonal
composers made out very well during this period, Britten and Tippett among
them. While certain good composers suffered neglect, good composers also
came to notice: Gerhard, Searle, Lutyens, Rawsthorne (a non-serialist,
incidentally), Davies, and LeFanu, to name only six. I don't deny that
good composers were also lost. But resources for art are scarce: it's a
tough game. I actually prefer that the light of regard shifts from time to
time, mainly because I don't like to see things settled from one generation
to the next. It feels to me like a kind of intellectual death.
Most of the composers on the outs, including Veale, shared at least one
trait other than their tendency to write tonally: they wrote in an idiom
not immediately identifiable as belonging to an individual. Instead, they
took personal approaches to idioms they inherited. I admit my first listen
to this CD caused me to underrate Veale. Immediately following something
so outstandingly individual as the Britten, Veale's concerto seemed bland
and genteel, free of surprises. I found the juxtaposition more than a
little cruel to Veale. However, I also listened to the Veale work all by
itself, a couple of days separate from the Britten, and then it got its
hooks into me. It was a simple matter of letting Veale tell his story his
own way, rather than my expecting him to tell it Britten's (or even my)
way.
This is a concerto of huge artistic risk. From the opening measures,
Veale proclaims this a work with big ideas spread across a big canvas.
The opening allegro pits soaring lines against an obsessive rhythmic idea,
and it takes a while to get to the soloist's entry. The composer could so
easily run out of gas or fall on his face or step across the line to pure
bathos. But his step is sure, and he has mastered contrast -- the movement
alternately rages and broods. The rage is never far from the worry, thanks
to Veale's poetic transformations of his rhythmic obsession. The idiom
resembles that of Walton's first symphony, and the liner notes tell me that
Veale considered Walton a major influence, although he never studied with
that composer. Incidentally, Veale did study with two American masters:
Sessions and Harris. Indeed, he was "possibly" Harris's only English
pupil. Foreman claims there's a Harris influence on Veale's works from
that time. I don't hear it here, but Veale began his concerto in the early
Eighties, after about a twenty-year creative silence. Indeed, I find in
the concerto far more similarity to Sessions, even though their idioms
differ so much. Both are concerned with the long, singing line, even in
quick passages. The long second movement opens with the violin singing
a line of heartbreaking sweetness, and yet it never falls into a "real"
song. He contrasts that with a more astringent idea, and the contrast --
or rather the interpenetration of these moods -- becomes the meat of the
movement. Again, the composer pushes the movement up to, but never past,
the limit of the listener's attention. The finale, a fizzy Waltonian
allegro, similar in mood to the Capriccio Burlesco, begins by blowing
away the rage and the nostalgia, morphing themes from the earlier movements
into their joyful equivalents. But the joy is tinged with the yearning
of the second movement, as recalls of that singing continually break in.
Veale brings off something terrific. He always renews his enthusiasm
convincingly, but the interruptions of the slower music come closer and
closer together, bringing up the dramatic question of how the movement
will end. I won't give it away.
Hickox and Mordkovitch become perfect champions of both concerti. As I
say, they put the Britten concerto in a new, more substantial light, and
they make the best case possible for Veale's music: you want to hear more
of it. I think it time that I stop regarding Hickox as primarily a choral
conductor. If he can widen his repertoire (and if a recording company will
take a chance on letting him), he has a fair chance of becoming a successor
to Barbirolli. One can fairly argue that Rattle is already that, but it
doesn't hurt to have two Barbirollis. Mordkovitch has been tainted with
the label "house violinist" for Chandos, but to me she just gets better and
better. Certainly, she displays here a very order of musicianship indeed.
Neither concerto is a walk in the park in the technique and musicality
demanded. I admit she sometimes comes across as too reserved -- though not
here -- unwilling to let 'er rip, and it may become a matter of matching
her to those concerti suited to her artistic personality. I'm not sure,
for example, I'd want to hear her in the Tchaikovsky or any of the
Wieniawskis, for example, but I'd definitely line up to hear her Bruch,
Beethoven, and Sibelius.
Chandos's sound is downright elegant.
Steve Schwartz
|
