BBC Proms at Perth

Perth Concert Hall - 03/08/23

On the afternoon of Sunday 3rd September, the BBC Proms came to Perth Concert Hall, for the first time, with a live broadcast on Radio 3 of a programme featuring the multi-award-winning English Heath Quartet and the celebrated Scottish virtuoso pianist, Steven Osborne.  The programme and performers were introduced from the stage by BBC Radio 3 presenter, Petroc Trelawny. 

Haydn’s early quartet (1771) in E flat major, Op.9 No.2, is still in the mould of solo first violin accompanied by the other three players, though there are signs in the outer movements of the emergent ‘democratisation’ that Haydn introduced, turning the genre into the ideal vehicle for conversational, intimate chamber music.  Playing from tablets with the cellist seated on a raised plinth and the others standing, affording ample opportunity to all for eye contact, most fully exploited by violist Gary Pomeroy, the music received the full chamber music treatment.  Leader Sara Wolstenholme’s tone was sweet and radiant, while her perfectly articulated triplets near the end of the exposition (repeat honoured) were quite delicious.  Flawless intonation preserved the full warmth of E flat through the adventurous development, subtle changes in mutually responsive phrasing and dynamics colouring any repeated or imitative figures.  The minuet is one of Haydn’s briefest, so much so that, unconventionally, the repeats were observed in the reprise.  The trio featured a lovely dialogue between leader and second violinist Juliette Roos.  The slow movement is very operatic, with a mysterious recitative on first violin giving way to an expressive arioso, very reminiscent of melodies from Gluck’s Orfeo (1762) and, frankly, miles better than any of Haydn’s actual operatic music, concluding with an ornate cadenza.  The finale is a lovely witty quick dance, with a scrumptious close-harmony run for the two violins, that gets repeated.  Smiles in the music, smiles on stage, smiles in the audience.  Perfect. 

Though the Heath Quartet have won a Gramophone Chamber Award for their recordings of the complete Tippett quartets, Sir Michael Tippett was represented in the programme by his Second Piano Sonata, written after the opera King Priam in an austere style very different from the genial bucolic joie-de-vivre of the quartets, which I got to know and love in the vinyl recordings by The Lindsays in the 70s.  Interviewed briefly by Petroc on stage, after extolling the auditorium (no argument from me) and revealing that the Steinway on stage was the same instrument he had chosen for them 20 years ago, Steven told how the working title for the Sonata had been ‘Mosaic’, in the sense of ‘composed of fragments’, though the fragments do not in fact coalesce into any kind of representational image.  This may be so, but the variety of the fragments does fascinate, angry and discordant, impressionistic, martial, mystic; sometimes Lisztian, sometimes Debussy-like; there are even moments of birdsong and jazz chords that would not be out of place in a Messiaen composition.  I would say: more ‘abstract collage’ than ‘mosaic’.  It received the ultimate advocacy from Steven Osborne. 

Pianist and quartet came together after the interval for Shostakovich’s 1940 Piano Quintet.  As often with Shostakovich’s chamber music, it is more the private man than the public persona that appears, nonetheless enigmatic for all that.  The music is uncharacteristically neo-classical, beginning with a Prelude and Fugue, hugely influenced by Bach, yet a full decade before the 24 Preludes and Fugues.  At a time when Europe was disintegrating under the onslaught of the Third Reich, and the mutual Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union was looking increasingly precarious, Shostakovich seems to retreat into a numb meditativeness, with elements of world-weariness and ennui that so characterise the Russian novel.  Written between the 6th and 7th Symphonies, there is a sense of uneasy calm before a storm, and contradictory moments of insouciance and anxiety.  The interpretation caught all these nuances perfectly, without compromising on any of the beauty of the music, which is simply phenomenal.  Written with his friends the members of the Beethoven Quartet in mind to perform with himself at the piano, it is Shostakovich at his most tuneful and direct, genial and conversational, but also with moments of deeply-felt soliloquy, especially for cello, played with great sensitivity by Christopher Murray.  It is a great favourite of mine and received a committed and utterly convincing reading from Steven and the string players.  The Prelude, stern at first, gives way to a waltz-like reverie, belying the Bachian logical structure.  The Fugue, slow and meditative, builds to an anxious climax, then subsides to a melancholy but calm close.  The riotously drunken Scherzo blows off some steam with thrilling coarseness, from much the same stable as the second movement of the 6th Symphony.  Bach to Bachian gravitas for the Intermezzo, where a walking bass on cello underlies a first violin rhapsodic meditative soliloquy.  All except the second violin contribute to this dreamscape.  When the second violin finally speaks, the strings carry the music to an impassioned climax while the piano numbly assumes the walking bass. I always find this very moving – Shostakovich expressing so much feeling through the strings, yet appearing numbed and mute himself.  On Sunday, it was perfectly realised by Steven and the Heath Quartet.  In a typical Shostakovich trick, a repeated note on piano at the end of the Intermezzo segues directly into the first sunny theme of the Finale (the Second Piano Concerto is a more famous instance).  The second theme, more dance-like and symphonic, proves top-heavy and collapses to a troubled anxious minor-key exploration of the two themes, even including a quotation from the Prelude.  Then suddenly, these cares are forgotten, the sun comes out, the major key is restored and the coda, with a wink and a smile and delicious harmonies, seems to say “see, there really was nothing to worry about?”  Haydnesque smiles rounded off a perfect performance. 

Less than a year after the premiere of the Quintet, Shostakovich and his family were staying in Samara, having been evacuated from Leningrad during the horrific siege of that city; the composer was working feverishly on the monumental Seventh Symphony.  There was, perhaps after all, something to worry about.