BBCSSO: The Rite of Spring
City Halls, Glasgow - 23/02/23
“Legendary, Riotous, Banger Stravinsky” – the latest poetic tagline from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s 2022-23 City Halls season promised two Stravinsky ballet scores: the seminal, spirit-shocking, riot-provoking 1913 ‘Rite of Spring’, and the quirky, experimental, semi-serialist 1957 ballet score ‘Agon’, together with a Bach keyboard concerto, with new Principal Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth directing, both from the podium and, in the Bach, from the keyboard. The concert was broadcast live on Radio 3, introduced from the hall by Kate Molleson, and was very well attended.
In a (very sensible) change to the published programme order, the Bach Keyboard Concerto No. 2 in E major opened the concert. Seeing the conductor billed as soloist prompted a reading of his biography from the programme and I was astonished to learn that as well as a flourishing conducting career, he is an accomplished concert and recital pianist and a composer with at least one opera, ‘A Winter’s Tale’, and a host of other commissions to his name. Maestro Wigglesworth is an immensely gifted musician and a terrific “catch” for the BBCSSO.
Bach’s concerto is a reworking of cantata music into a concerto format (probably originally with a different solo instrument) for keyboard and small string ensemble that is harmonically and contrapuntally rich and elegant. I applaud the decision to perform it with a piano as the solo instrument, as the expressive and dynamic possibilities opened up by eschewing the harpsichord are, to me, vastly preferable to the strangled tone of the period instrument. The opening Allegro was nonetheless subtle, measured and delightful. The 12/8 Siciliano slow movement in the relative C# minor was no less elegant and was played with great delicacy. The exquisite string harmonies at the end of the movement were particularly beautifully played. The gleeful 3/8 Allegro saw piano and strings dance around each other, pausing only for a brief characterful cadenza. This was chamber Kaffeekonzert music at its very best and a super opening to the evening.
‘Agon’, which followed, demands a huge orchestra, though the forces are mostly used sparingly in different small combinations, exploring novel and unusual tonal colours and effects. This means that the players are often called on to play challenging short phrases with irregular metre, while maximally exposed. The quality of virtuosic musicianship was uniformly excellent. Despite flirtations with serialism, much of the music is witty and whimsical and even charming. I don’t consider it to be top-drawer Stravinsky, but I was very glad to catch it in live performance and Maestro Wigglesworth ensured that it received the maximum advocacy from the players.
But ‘The Rite of Spring’ was what the Glasgow audience was really there for. Subtitled ‘Pictures from Pagan Russia’, the idea for the ballet in which, as a human sacrifice, a girl dances herself to death, purportedly came to Stravinsky in a dream. The 1947 revision as a concert work for large orchestra, as invariably recorded and performed since then, is an extraordinary piece which transports the listener to an animistic world inhabited by the spirits of the ancestors, who must be propitiated for the earth to regenerate after winter. The narrative unfolds as a ritual in two parts, in music that is fiendishly complex, rhythmically and harmonically. The huge forces are occasionally used sparingly, but for the most part there is a sense of inexorable dynamic drive to a fateful conclusion. Cross-rhythms and syncopation, irregular metre and phrase lengths and huge dynamic contrasts are as exciting as they are disorienting. The music is as shockingly new as it was a century ago and, for each listener, as it was on first hearing. The experience for the audience member is visceral and immensely cathartic. Notwithstanding the undeniable challenges, it is also exhilarating and compelling to perform. Under the guidance of a great conductor and with a fine orchestra, the experience for all present is unforgettable. So it was on Thursday night. Quite superb.