After almost two months of music, the 2009 Proms season is now entering its final stretch. The pleasantly dusky feeling that accompanies the wind down to the finish (notwithstanding of course the bluster of the Last Night) does not imply artistic torpor, however, as evidenced by David Robertson's thrilling collaboration with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Prom 63.
Robertson and the BBC SO's concert presented a set of works that are far apart in terms of style, yet made curious sense when joined by the ellipses of performance. Xenakis dominated the evening, both by number and by sheer force of compositional skill and personality. In the first half his tour de force of place and colour Nomos gamma was paired with Rachmaninov's interesting but ultimately compromised tone poem The Isle of the Dead.
The Xenakis piece requires that the orchestra be distributed amongst the audience, and so we were treated to the curious spectacle of a festive looking band sitting merrily alongside standing Prommers on the arena floor. Seated in the gallery the impact of the arrangement was somewhat lessened, but the visual and theatrical spectacle, in addition to the unusual acoustic distribution, was still powerful. In their cocktail white suits and black outfits, at the bourgeois Proms, playing this thunderous drum and bass led music (the various bass wind players and drummers deserve special credit for their scintillating playing) that sounds as if it were transcribed from the eruptions of a mad volcano, the orchestra and conductor made a curious vision, giving an anatomy of melancholia full of strange cultural symbolisms.
The Rachmaninov was well played. Robertson seduced us with glamorously ponderous, though effectively portentous, phrasing, but the good work done by performers and composer was somewhat undone in the latter stages, where the Dies Irae theme steals in unconvincingly to conquer the purposeful musical design with a programmatic vanquishing of its poetics. The second half again had Xenakis paired with a popular Russian, but now the relation seemed much more sympathetic. Shostakovich's ninth symphony is of course one of the most ludicrous of canonical symphonic works, seeming at every moment to send-up the symphonic dream of its title. It needs a sprightly band, and on this occasion its twists and turns met with ideal interpreters. Robertson's leadership was full of bathos; portentous in the Largo, and ridiculous in the Moderato.
The audience's confused smiles were matched by my own during Aïs by Xenakis. It is a deeply serious work in one sense in that it seeks to convey the frustration and stupefaction we all feel in the face of death, yet the baritone's yelping falsetto and belligerent growls (a startling Leigh Melrose), mirrored by Colin Currie's propulsive battering on drums, unsettled through their farce as much as they did their terror. As with the Rachmaninov, the piece seeks to explore a journey toward and within a death-place, but its means and its poetry take as their object the terrifying confusion of death, rather than the finessed auguring of the earlier work. The performance was duly exhilarating and unnerving. The Last Night should be a blast if Robertson and the BBC SO are on the sort of form shown tonight.
Photo: David Robertson
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