Romanticism (and romanticism) Overwrought: Russian Romance and Icelandic Elements (Prom 8) at Royal Albert Hall
Mawkishly mundane conducting inundated landmarks by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov with eyesores of mistakes in a selection of contemporary and well-known works.
Dalia Stasevska conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Credit: Chris Christodoulou/BBC Proms
Stillness tilled the earth in music’s sterile stretches of terrain amidst the World Wars that broke twentieth century ground, inviting victims to alight at barren stations. What emerged was an immersion into melody’s demise: a manic need to needle harmony with monotone and arm new works with voided melody.
Loaned only scant repeated notes, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s music to the film The Miners’ Hymns (2011) limps from nihilism. Haunting in its taunting and interminable long-held notes, the part “They Being Dead Yet Speaketh” draws on choral modesty to silence hope. But at conductor Dalia Stasevska’s helm it had no choice but to relent to crazed crescendi; loathfully returning to the site of decorous expression long ago deserted by composers.
Loading staves with excess sentiment, Stasevska let overexcitement cite the dangers of engaging too emotionally with music in a Prom of patently disparate works. Unleashing the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the world premiere of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s “The Fact of the Matter” – a fifteen-minute musing on the soul’s displacement amidst pain implacable – the maestra risked a band of bumbling brass and sour-sounding strings to launch attacks with uninhibited élan; repeated notes with panegyrics of panache. Slickness slid thankfully across the execution of the piece by the appropriately timed BBC Singers – who impinged upon its strings’ absenting tremolos vibrato tingling with presentiments and premonitions. Resistant to aplomb, the minimalist composition stayed true to its sameness despite stabs at bombasticity on its conductor’s part.
Rachmaninov’s immeasurable Second Piano Concerto, on the other hand, did not. Swept away by bars awash in waves of longing lilts and storming ships and testy tempests, the succumbed conductor let the music sway and dive and splash – and recklessly. Flutes floundered like a pair of collapsing oars in incohesion while brass spluttered like a semi-functioning old fog horn; strings steered left and right devoid of variation in vibrato. Impassioned with the pulse of drunken sailors’ singing, the musicians sailed amidst relentless squalls of lapses prompted by Stasevska’s over-quick and overwhelming force. Delays of entrances were frequent and the cymbal tumbled tardily into its notes in the third movement.
Pianist Denis Kozhukhin met this careless self-surrender with a comparably more tamed but almost indistinct interpretation of the magnum opus. Choppily disjointed chords were dealt deliberate accentuation till successors sprung forth in a jazzy, zest-consumed display; in the first movement some in the right hand were held too long and traded torment for felicity.
Diverting forte into sudden spells of strength-deprived diminuendo, the performer seemed to play a game of hide-and-seek with his contrasting chords and scales. Coquettish were brief intervals before attacks meant to be teasing in attempts at musicality that served to ease Kozhukhin’s grip on taste. Trills riffed without respite in arrays of overlengthened ornaments while other notes at times tip-toed in reverence around the (greater) other hand.
Unkemptness nested in Stasevska’s rendering of the renowned “Fantasy Overture”: Tchaikovsky’s take on Romeo and Juliet. Here a humility before enforced fortissimos hid sections out of earshot; shoving an ascending chord on harp into a corner semi-audible. Whirlwinds of speed decreed that woodwind come unwound in dwindled, waned deposits. Bassoons bashed heads in truant unison. Although Stasevska lends renditions predetermined rhythms they emerge with squawking horns and slapstick falls on piccolo.
Thus the unpopular components of this Prom – its newer, contrapuntually contrarian works – emerged the most unscathed. The argument for frugal feeing rarely sounded more triumphant than it did in this night to forget.
The BBC Proms run at the Royal Albert Hall until Saturday 10th September.