BBC SSO: Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste
City Halls, Glasgow - 15/12/22
After a fortnight’s gap, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra returned to Glasgow’s City Halls on the evening of 15th December, under the baton of Israeli Principal Guest Conductor, Ilan Volkov, in a 20th century programme billed as ‘Riveting, Mysterious, Spine-Tingling Bartók’. There was an avant garde flavour to the evening, which also included pieces by Xenakis, Debussy and Ligeti. It occurred to me that a possible covert unifying theme for the programme might be ‘pieces attractive to director Stanley Kubrick for possible inclusion in film music calculated to inspire a profound sense of unease in a cinema audience’.
Long delays on the M80 (possibly due to a match at Ibrox) and traffic congestion around the Merchant City meant that I missed the Xenakis but caught the rest of the programme. The concert was moderately well attended.
Debussy’s ballet music for Diaghilev’s production ‘Jeux’, improbably narrating a love triangle on a tennis court (seriously!), has outlasted the lacklustre 1913-premiered Nijinsky-choreographed flop as a single-movement concert piece with the subtitle ‘poème dansée’. A mere fortnight after ‘Jeux’, Stravinsky’s ‘Le Sacre du printemps’ was the riot-provoking sensation that Diaghilev desired, so ‘Jeux’ has been largely forgotten. The orchestration and sonic picture-painting are as imaginative and evocative as anything in ‘La Mer’ of 8 years previously and surely merit more frequent programming and performance? The mysterious opening features chording that bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Dukas’ 1897 ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’. Particularly pleasing also is some great writing for the cello section and they shone, with some great solo playing from section principal Rudi De Groote. Both Hispanic and oriental influences are detectable in the melodic elements. The piece is not symphonic in structure, more a free narrative. Nonetheless, a strong sense of capricious sprightly elements underscored by dark menacing forces is engendered. Maestro Volkov’s evident rapport with the players, and the resultant high quality of playing, delivered an excellent performance and it was very well received.
Ligeti’s 1969 ‘Ramifications - for strings’ is a piece for 12 stringed instruments which exploits micropolyphony, instruments tuned a quarter tone apart playing simultaneously, to generate a dense sonic cloud. Perfect for Stanley Kubrick movies where it adds to the sense of disorientation and dread that the visionary director sought to evoke. Less so for the concert hall. I have no wish to detract from the skill of the performers, which was phenomenal, so I’ll just say that, at 9 minutes, the piece is mercifully short.
By contrast, the headline piece by Ligeti’s Hungarian compatriot Bartók, his 1936 masterpiece ‘Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’, is a very great favourite of mine, since first encountering its Adagio used to great effect in Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ in the cinema in Thurles, Co. Tipperary in the summer of 1981, before cycling back to Dublin to find out whether I had passed my B.Sc. (I had). I immediately borrowed the piece from UCD’s record library and deemed it then, as still now, a composition of utter perfection. There is even a wry self-mocking joke in the name of the piece. There is a piano on stage. It is evidently not the celesta, so which is it, a stringed instrument or a percussion instrument? Well, of course, with hammers which strike strings, it is both. However, Bartók’s early critics had deplored the percussive elements in his writing for the instrument as well as his performing style, while cartoon caricatures had depicted him attacking a piano with an array of bludgeoning weapons. I consider that, with ‘Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’, and no less with the ‘Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion’ of the following year, he answered those critics once and for all with works of radiant genius.
The Andante tranquillo which opens the work is oddly named because, though the dynamics change slowly, they rise to a very non-tranquil climax before retreating back to silence. This archlike structure is echoed by the fugal polyphony, amplifying the woe and grief of the desolate opening viola melody in music that is deeply troubled and far from tranquil. The scherzo, marked Allegro, is exciting and rhythmic with elements of Hungarian folk dance fused with fugato and more syncopated elements and a glorious central section where harp and pizzicato strings run a hectic pursuit with syncopated chords from the piano – truly magical and it always reminds me of a similar passage in the first movement of Stravinsky’s Symphony in 3 Movements. The Adagio, macabre and dread-inspiring, is the most unsettling example of Bartók’s ‘night music’ style. A quickening repeated note high on the xylophone creates a sense of suspense, perhaps evoking an unseen cicada, the friendliest of the unseen horrors that unfold. A downward swoop on the pedal timpani evokes a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach. In ‘The Shining’, Kubrick coupled this with a fixed perspective, shifting focus shot in a long corridor to create a sense of vertigo on the horizontal, an unsurpassed cinematographic achievement in my view. String comments amplify the dread. Solo violin harmonics with celeste evoke a tragic other-worldly desolation, while imitative phrases at double speed on harp, tuned percussion and pizzicato strings suggest a malevolent pursuer in the darkness. The movement concludes as it began with the cicada and the sinking timpani. The Allegro molto finale dispels the gloom with an excitingly abandoned Hungarian/Bulgarian knees-up.
This was the last concert of the BBCSSO’s pre-Christmas season and the quality of the playing, which has been excellent all season, was absolutely superb. I am immensely grateful to Maestro Volkov for a reading of the Bartók as fine as any I have heard, and by a long chalk the best I have heard live. The next day, snow blanketed my world and the Adagio was lodged as an earworm, so I was living in the setting of ‘The Shining’. Scary but magnificent.