Scriabin: Promethée, Le Poème du Feu - Liszt: Prometheus - Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini - Mussorgsky: Night on the Bald Mountain

Yesterday we were invited to a concert at the Brussels Bozar with a nice VIP package: walking dinner at the residence of the British ambassador, nice seats on the first balcony, refreshments during the concert, and dessert buffet afterwards. Thank you, WE. The London Philharmonic was visiting with an enterprising programme revolving around the dyonisian and the luciferian as twin leitmotivs. I hadn't yet heard this orchestra play under their Principal Conductor Vladimir Jurowski. Nikolai Lugansky took the solo part in the Rachmaninov Rhapsody, whilst remarkably enough another soloist, Igor Levit, was seated at the keyboard in the Scriabin.

I hadn't looked in great detail at the programme so I was quite shocked when the orchestra started to play Mussorgsky's Night on the Bald Mountain in the original version. I almost didn't recognise it, so different it is from the Rimsky 'recomposition' we are used to. I wouldn't say the original is technically the better piece, but it is such a wild and wacky ride that it is a treat anyhow! I looked it up and it appears that there are only very few recorded versions of this in the catalogue (luckily there is Naxos).

I heard Lugansky live before and I must say that I am not terribly taken with his rather detached mien. The Rhapsody confirmed the kind of dispassionate virtuosity that he brings to bear on musical proceedings. He was evidently also in a hurry, egging on Jurowski who made the error to follow suit which led to Lugansky pressing on even more. The final variations were predictably breathless. All in all it didn't make much of an impression on me. It certainly didn't eclipse the timeless favourite I have on CD with Bella Davidovich at the keyboard and a fairly young Neeme Järvi at the helm of a appropriately luxuriant Concertgebouw Orchestra.

After the break we proceeded with Liszt's Prometheus. Again a novelty for me. It's one of Liszt's shorter symphonic poems that started life as an overture to a cantata based on Herder's Der Entfesselte Prometheus. It offers a characteristic potpourri of the martial, the diabolical and the exultantly maestoso. Again, I was left slightly unfulfilled by a serviceable but not a great performance. It seemed to me Jurowski was a little too cautious in a piece that should be played absolutely recklessly.

Scriabin's Poème du Feu provided an appropriately impressive finale (unfortunately without Lichtstimme). You could tell that Jurowski spent most of his rehearsal time on this hyperchromatic and harmonically supersaturated Fremdkörper. Composed in 1909/10, it signals the end of an era. Soon Bartok would branch off and start to use folk music to revitalise Western art music. Just a year before, Schoenberg had written his first composition without any key (the thirteenth song of his Buch der Hängenden Gärten). And in that same year, Strauss would return from the brink of atonality with his neoclassicist Rosenkavalier. Scriabin's music sounds like a iridescent cloud, hovering above the orchestra in an unpredictable swirl of contraction and expansion and slowly edging towards that concluding and liberating F-sharp major triad. The choir, who came all the way down from Latvia, had only a few minutes of vocalisation to contribute. It's a splendid extravaganza that defies all notions of cost-effectiveness.

All in all an interesting evening with very good rather than great music making. The LPO is a fine orchestra, but not in the class of top-flight bands as, say, the Budapest Festival Orchestra. It lacks the last ounce of refinement and poise but produces an attractive, slightly husky and gritty tone. Maybe the Henry Le Boeuf Hall at the Bozar is not optimal to showcase this particular orchestra's qualities.
I can't really make up my mind about what sort of conductor Jurowski is. After the concert he spoke at length at the ambassador's residence about the programme (omitting one interesting tidbit about the Poème du Feu, namely that Scriabin started to work on it whilst he was living in Brussels). Evidently he is someone who is also interested in a conceptual grasp on the music. He is certainly to be commended to insist on adventurous programming beyond the ambit of traditional subscription concerts.

Der Bote - A Lubimov recital

Listened twice this week to this wonderful recital recorded by Alexei Lubimov. Why don't we have more of these intelligent and adventurous compilations, rather than perennial rehashes of the core repertoire? I'm transcribing Lubimov's own liner notes here:

Melancholy - that is the title one might give to this programme. Nostalgic pictures, some will suggest, and others: quiet meditation. Music written for oneself, one might also think; like a diary not meant for publication, in which you note down only what is most personal, what is memorable for no one but you and yet says a great deal.
Whatever else these collected pieces may be given, one or two words are not enough to show why these unpretentious masterpieces from three centuries so smoothly gather into a single strand that unravels a bundle of associations and memories so dear to their performer. Within these composers' works each piece holds a fairly modest place: in most cases it is but a marginal note in a long novel. However, linked together here by their unassuming, meditative poetry and the deeper inner impulse of their creators, who are not inhibited by any commission or external circumstance, they convey a particular significance to me - and to my listeners too, I hope - with its own logic and atmosphere. Thus what we have here is the story of a sort of journey, each stage of which is meant not so much to reveal the composer's soul as to bring us gradually closer to that essential source from which all these musical compositions draw their kinship and to which they owe their inner unity.
Then it no longer seems strange that Silvestrov's Messenger (Der Bote) should sound as if it had come straight out of the 18th century and C.P.E. Bach's Fantasia should appear nearly the most modern piece in the programme (Cage's In a Landscape); that the gentle wistfulness of Glinka's Parting (La Séparation) and the almost Brahms-like bitterness of Chopin's Prelude Op. 45 should have as their perfect counterparts the aloofness and chaste restraint of the elegies by Liszt, Bartok and Debussy; that Mansurian's Nostalgia and Silvestrov's Elegy should point regretfully to the fact that even the radical changes that followed Webern have vanished in a nostalgic past; and that the most avant-garde composer of the 20th century - John Cage - should present us with a most delicate and poetic flower, a genuine East Indian lotus flower floating away on a sea of oblivion ... Oblivion? - There is no such thing as oblivion, Silvestrov says with his Messenger; it is enough to fling open a window, to strike a match, to look at a cloud, to hear a triad, for memories - not only ours but also those, unknown to us, of all these messengers - to start working a miracle.