A performance of one of Bach’s Passions, his dramatic retellings of the Arrest, Trial and Crucifixion of Christ, is not something you stroll along to in a take-it-or-leave-it frame of mind. You feel obliged to adopt a keen serious attentiveness, and an openness to the numinous even if you’re actually a sceptic.
That attitude was richly rewarded at last night’s wonderful performance of the St John Passion by a terrific cast of soloists and the OAE. The tenor Mark Padmore directed as well as playing the storytelling role of the Evangelist, and his numerous little musical and dramatic touches showed the wisdom of someone who’s been performing this work for decades. Admittedly there was a downside to the lack of a conductor: the balance sometimes seemed awry, with the male singers dominating the female, and the chorus as a whole overshadowed by the orchestra. But in terms of intimacy and that special intensity that comes when a group of singers and players are responding to the smallest hint from each other, it paid huge dividends.
Padmore knows it takes the most modest gestures to bring the drama to life: signalling Christ’s loneliness by having him stand alone, and asking each singer to turn and listen to the solo instrument that accompanies them within the orchestra, as if they were companions in the telling of this stupendous story. The St. John Passion is the most grippingly dramatic of Bach’s Passions, and sometimes the sheer cruelty of the Trial Scene (“Crucify Him!” the chorus shouts again and again) can be overwhelming. Those choruses were tremendous here, but they didn’t blot out the little luminous episodes which often pass unnoticed, like the one where the Evangelist tells us the soldiers standing guard outside the High Priest’s house made a fire to keep themselves warm. The way Padmore told this detail made one actually feel the fire’s warmth, and in that moment the soldiers seemed human, rather than part of a cast of villains assaulting the Son of God.
There were many other glowing details, from all the soloists. Mezzo-soprano Paula Murrihy made the words “It is finished” in her great aria seem as weighty as a tombstone, and yet soft. In her final aria soprano Mary Bevan spun a thin thread of sound that merged with the two accompanying soft-toned flutes — a perfect aural image of humility. The evening’s discovery for me was young tenor Laurence Kilsby, who made every detail tell in his anguished aria contemplating the tormented body of Christ. At the end, the chorus brought us gently down to earth with simple, almost homely hymns. It was comforting, as if the dreadful story we’d just witnessed had now passed into eternity.
RPO/Petrenko, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆
Founded by the flamboyant, eccentric and extraordinarily rich Sir Thomas Beecham 75 years ago, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is the great workhorse of the orchestral world. One week, you’ll find it playing music from computer games, the next a blockbuster movie programme, the week after that a “serious” concert such as this one. The orchestra has recently appointed a new music director: Vasily Petrenko, the energised and perpetually boyish Russian whose 15-year tenure at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra was a golden period in that orchestra’s history.
Now should be the happy springtime of his new appointment, but Wednesday night’s concert was overshadowed by world events, as any concert will be that is led by a Russian. From the podium, Petrenko reminded us that he has Ukrainian and Russian parentage, and described the war as “one of the greatest moral failures and humanitarian disasters of our century”. What he didn’t say is that he has also suspended his directorship of the Russian State Symphony Orchestra in Moscow. To say and do these things takes real courage, as one can be sure they will be noted by the authorities in Russia.
Then it was time for the music, which was cunningly contrived to be linked thematically (there were pieces by Britten and Shostakovich, who first met in 1960 in the very hall we were sitting in) and also popular. Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is one of those pieces anyone over a certain age remembers fondly from their childhood. It feels somehow ubiquitous, but actually is quite rarely played. So it was a pleasure to hear this brilliant confection, although the very opening was the only mis-step of the evening.
Petrenko launched the famous melody by Purcell on which the piece is based at a ponderous pace as if to dignify it, which felt odd because it is after all only a modest little dance composed for a theatre production. But then, he and the piece sprang into life and the music fairly zipped along. Every player relished their moment in the sun during Britten’s masterly guided tour of the orchestra (all hail to those chirruping flutes), but the piece is also a masterclass in combining colours, a fact of which players and conductor were keenly aware. The combination of harp, violas and horns seemed as succulent as a rare beefsteak.
After the multi-coloured tapestry of Britten came the battleship grey of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto. The soloist was Pablo Ferrández, a young Spanish cellist who collects prizes at international competitions the way a pullover collects burrs. Despite that commendable though potentially worrying sign, he turned out to be a player of not only amazing technique but also real personality.
The opening melody was perky and sinister at once, the long, lonely melody of the slow movement sounded as threatened and fragile as it should. At the opposite pole were those frenzied moments where the cello seems to be fleeing from a tormentor, which can sound ugly if pushed too hard, but in Ferrández’s hands never were.
Most taxing of all is the huge solo cadenza that links the third and final movements, which in this performance seemed to rise with agonising slowness from a black pit of loneliness. There was no warm daylight at the end of that rise, only the partial comfort of a sardonic puppet-dance, which soloist and orchestra flung off with a nicely-calibrated appearance of roughness.
After that, around 20 more players joined the orchestra for the final, ear-shattering magnificence of William Walton’s First Symphony. It’s hard not to be swept away by this music’s irresistible high-gloss, filmic rhetoric, but I’m often left wondering if there’s actually any substance underneath it all. Petrenko encouraged the players to shape the recurring filmic “hooks” and surging phrases with maximum fire and finesse, and the devil’s dance of the second movement really did sound malicious, as the composer requested.
In the slow movement, the solo melodies from cellist Richard Harwood and clarinetist Katherine Lacy, rapturously intertwined over Patrick King’s drowsy kettledrums, just about stilled my qualms. Walton’s symphony may not really be a masterpiece, but in a wonderful performance like this it seems such a brilliant imitation of one that you hardly mind. IH
