EIF: The Closing Concert
Usher Hall - 27/08/23
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra - Karina Canellakis, conductor
After the supreme triumphs of Friday’s and Saturday’s Usher Hall concerts (see previous reviews), this Closing Concert had a hard act to follow. That it didn’t quite achieve the heights of the others is no real criticism and is perhaps down more to the programming than anything else. Pairing the ‘Prelude’ and ‘Liebestod’’ from Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’ with Scriabin’s ‘Le Poème de l’Ecstase’ was an interesting and logical first half, but Rachmaninoff’s cantata ‘The Bells,’ as the final piece, didn’t work for me, splendidly performed though it was by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, conducted by the charismatic American, Karina Canellakis.
Even without the rest of the opera, the purely orchestral Prelude and Liebestod (‘Love-death’), premiered in Paris in 1862, three years before Tristan und Isolde’s first performance in Munich, was an earth-shattering experience, one of the seminal moments in musical history. Today the audacity of Wagner’s harmonic creativity is still almost unbelievable, the famous ‘Tristan chord’ at the beginning no less astonishing for hundreds of hearings. This is music of pure sensuality, aimed directly at the heart and the emotions, a distillation of erotic sentiment unparalleled in any music before or since. Wagner expanded the ideas crystallised in this short orchestral suite over the four hours of the complete opera, and the whole experience of the stage work is necessary to fully appreciate his genius. However, a good rendition of this suite can be overwhelming, and Karina Canellakis and the BBCSSO gave us a performance of great intensity, the bare ‘Tristan chord’ expanding into great waves of sound, rising and falling waves of emotional sensuality. The prelude starts our journey, taking the listener to a first climactic moment, and then releasing us for a few moments until the wordless Liebestod cranks up the intensity to a point of no return, an emotional climax like no other, only gently to dissipate into the final cathartic and resolved chords at the end. I miss the total immersion achieved when the soprano, Isolde, sings her great peroration over the orchestral ocean of her love for Tristan, the Liebestod, uniting that love in death, which closes the opera. However, in the absence of the whole stage experience, this orchestral suite, magnificently controlled by Ms Canellakis, was a decent option.
I remember hearing ‘Le Poeme de l’Ecstase’ by Alexander Scriabin over forty years ago at another Festival concert in the Usher Hall, and I remember being emotionally drained by this extraordinary suffusion of erotic sentiment with mystical cosmology. Now that the first flushes of youth have given way to the perhaps more cold-hearted cynicism of maturity, I found the work, performed superbly by the BBCSSO, somewhat overblown. The final cathartic and climactic (yes, again) chord is truly spectacular and impressive but I found the emotional orchestral foreplay a bit tedious. The Poème, premiered in New York in 1908, is monumentally scored for an enormous orchestra, including 8 horns, glockenspiel, bells, tam-tam and organ, and is based philosophically on three main ideas - ‘his soul in the orgy of love, the realisation of a fantastical dream, and the glory of his own art!’ Pretentious? Never! Scriabin was nothing if not ambitious, both in his philosophy and in his music, but I have a feeling that the younger me was seduced by the whole exotic, erotic cornucopia of his imagination, and that the supposedly more mature me can now see the outrageous pretension involved! The Poème is not awful, but I don’t think it is as good as I once thought. Nonetheless, Ms Canellakis played it for all it’s worth, and her sensitive and elegant conducting made a good argument in favour of this extraordinary piece, the final climactic chord almost taking off the Usher Hall’s roof! The sound of the great free-standing bells was fabulous and reminded us that the second half of the concert was devoted to a performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s cantata, ‘The Bells’ (Kolokola).
Bizarrely, the bells which featured so much in the Scriabin don’t play at all in the Rachmaninoff. The whole piece is about bells, but they remain silent, a delicious anomaly! Perhaps it might win the Nobel Prize! I once sang the bass solo in this piece a long time ago but must confess to having forgotten all the music. It is an interesting work, but I fear not a great closing concert piece, ending as it does with a quiet ethereal evocation of peace. It’s not a showstopper, although well-performed by the BBCSSO, the massed ranks of the EFC and three excellent soloists, the Ukrainian soprano, Olga Kulchynska, the English tenor, David Butt-Philip and the Russian bass-baritone, Alexander Vinogradov. The tenor and chorus sing the first movement, ‘The Silver Sleigh Bells’, although there is little feel of a winter’s sleigh ride in Russia. I have known David Butt-Philip for a while, ever since he was a Young Artist at the Royal Opera House, and I sang the Ghost of his Father to his Hamlet at Glyndebourne in Brett Dean’s extraordinary opera, ‘Hamlet’. Since then, he has gone on to great things, singing Walther von Stolzing and Don José at the Vienna State Opera and Grigory at the Met in New York. He was somewhat short-changed in ‘The Bells,’ as he had to contend with full orchestra and chorus for much of the first movement. It’s a bit like the tenor in Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, who has great music, but the orchestration swamps even the mightiest of voices. I know that David has a powerful voice, but often I could see him singing a terrific high note but couldn’t hear a thing. I don’t think it was Ms Canellakis’ fault – the blame lies with Rachmaninoff.
The second movement, ‘The Mellow Wedding Bells’ was more kind to the soprano, and Ms Kulchynska revealed a very beautiful Slavic sound, reminiscent of my great old friend, Galina Vishnevskaya.
The third movement, with no solos, is a tour de force for the chorus as they sing of the ‘Loud Alarum Bells’, a terrifying exposition of the horrors of war. ‘The Bells’ is a Russian free verse translation by Konstantin Balmont of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, which captured Rachmaninoff’s imagination greatly. The Festival Chorus, ably trained by Aidan Oliver, gave a magnificent rendition of this movement, urged on thrillingly by Karina Canellakis.
The final movement, ‘The Mournful Iron Bells,’ introduced the Russian Bass-Baritone, Alexander Vinogradov, who gave an unforgettable account of this heartfelt music, mourning the Russian past, as events were soon to prove that most of that past would be swept away in the fervour following 1917. Mr Vinogradov was my voice of the Festival, warm, mellifluous and huge, dominating the whole stage with its Russian splendour, but capable of subtleties too. A world class voice and performance.
I just wish ’The Bells’ was a better work, and the Festival could have closed with a bang, rather than the whimper, lovely though it was, that Rachmaninoff gave us!
I’ll be putting together a few thoughts on the Festival as a whole in a couple of days, but at this juncture, I think we can say that, on the whole, Nicola Benedetti’s first has been a success. ‘Where we go from here’ is anyone’s guess, but I reckon we have some idea of the route.
Cover photo: Chris Christodoulou
