There was something oddly lopsided about last night’s LSO concert at the Barbican. It was as though conductor Michael Tilson Thomas had ordered the pieces on the programme according to popularity, starting from the least known: thus Ives' From the Steeples to the Mountains opened the evening, followed by The Unanswered Question, Prokofiev's well-loved Piano Concerto No. 3, and finally, Stravinsky's immensely popular Firebird (here in its original ballet-score guise, rather than as a Suite).
Ives' music is so reflexive and enigmatic that you'd think it best suited as a reflection after one of the other two showpieces on the programme. This enigmatic arrangement of the programme was compounded by the fact that, for the first third of the evening, the physical presence of the musicians was uncomfortably elusive: Tilson Thomas would have most of them playing offstage with only a few actual people playing in front us.
As the title suggests, From the Steeples and the Mountains title sets up a rural landscape, which is already implicit in the orchestration—the far away brass and the bells, the horn call. And yet, as often with Ives, this simple image is indeed shown to be layered, and complex: no two instruments are playing in the same key, and the bucolic horn calls build up to a thick, jarring game of echoes. Tilson imagined the piece quite aptly by having the frantic horn calls and bell-pealing playing on-stage, while a prolonged, composed resonance in the brass and bells sounded from off-stage on the loudspeakers.
The same principle was applied to the ensuing The Unanswered Question, but this time I found myself in stark disagreement to Tilson Thomas' vision. Predictably, the string quartet chords that underlie the whole piece (a sort of composed 'silence', standing, immutable, beneath the surface ripples) were played from off-stage and heard not through projection onto loudspeakers, but simply from the opened door of the left-side stage exit. Why was this? If this sound is supposed to be an all-encompassing, immutable sound then surely we are meant to hear it whispering to us from ever y corner of the hall?
Similarly, I was baffled to hear the trumpet call that soars so forlornly above it (the actual unanswered question) also coming from off-stage (this time from the right-side )? The off-stage playing seemed to hush this sharp, self-conscious gesture into the inanimate background. Left on stage were only the woodwinds, whose nervous twittering became the only 3D sound in a performance that seemed to unforgivably flatten out the magnificent, still sound of Ives' composition.
Now to Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto. One of the selling points of the concerts, no doubt, was that the soloist, Yuja Wang, is a new face on the classical music scene, who’s had her London debut on June 25, and who, at the young age of twenty-two, has just bagged a prestigious exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon, no less.
Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto is most definitely a young person's territory in many ways, if not for the sheer muscular strength its performance requires, then for the combination of wildly romantic abandon with teeth-gnashing, fierce gestures and moments of sheer cheeky sarcasm.
However, I found that one of the recurring problems was that the piano simply didn't project very well above the orchestra, which detracted from the overall sharpness of the sonority.
Wang plays with world-class technical brilliance throughout, and elegance, too. My concern would be one regarding the risk-taking that is required of any performer of the standard she is clearly heading for. A problem with Wang’s performance was a distinct lack of any expressive hesitation when rounding off her phrases, a slightly mechanical flair for technical difficulty that yielded some brilliant results but let the bittersweet sarcasm of many of Prokofiev's most inspired melodies simply slip, as it were, through her fingers.
One can make these criticisms in the safe knowledge that Wang is young and that her gifts are yet to yield their best fruit. As it is, her playing makes for spectacular entertainment (the audience was clearly electrified). If her expressive potential is even a fraction of the dazzling skill she showcased in Volodos' virtuosic paraphrase of the famous Alla Turca Rondo by Mozart—her encore—then we should have nothing to worry about.
Stravinsky's The Firebird occupied the entirety of the second half. The LSO idiosyncratically chose to play this popular work in its original version (as it would have sounded with Diaghilev's ballet), rather than in Stravinsky's own concert version, the Firebird Suite. This is a significant change, for the original music comes from the year 1910, that is, from the time before Stravinsky renounced his romantic flair for lush orchestration. Which is not to say that Stravinsky's work from after 1910 sounds in any way bare (cue: The Rite of Spring). But it sounds a lot sharper and focussed, the main reason being, perhaps, the sheer amount of strings involved in the original version.
What the strings do here is to sensibly soften up, almost muffle, the jarring, sinister undertones of the muted brass and pitched percussions (xylophone, vibraphone). The Firebird emerges as a strangely hybrid work pitched between Stravinsky, the composer of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and the last shards of Russian romanticism. Michael Tilson Thomas clearly revelled the wash of sound of the strings, and yet more could have been made of the moments of brutal folklore that haunt the score.
However, these are matter of interpretation. My overall feeling is that the concert missed out on some untapped potential, first with the odd rendering of The Unanswered Question, then with the somewhat neutral, if technically flawless, Prokofiev Piano Concerto, and lastly with the exaggerated softness of Stravinsky's Firebird.
Photo: Yuja Wang
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