Ease and struggle: these were the two compositional attitudes demonstrated in Thursday’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert. In the case of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 26 in D major, a sense of effortless flow was everywhere. The orchestra was brisk, elegant, refined, but soloist Martin Helmchen went further, like a rascally gymnast seeking to push himself and the players to ever greater tumbling velocity. He opted for a distinct change in tone through the first movement development – focused, less playful, as if considering the potential of the material in real time – as well as the central Larghetto, making it so personal it was as if his part were something intimate being confided to us.
But it was his rapid athleticism that typified the performance, Kazuki Yamada humbly following Helmchen’s elastic approach, pulling at the pulse one moment, lingering on a phrase the next, all the while not merely putting the CBSO in accompaniment mode but giving the piano a real run for its money. It was an arresting, even bracing start, one that in hindsight could not have been more ideal to prepare for the Bruckner 9 to come.
Now came the struggle, one that from the outset encompassed extremes, Yamada encouraging both quietude and roaring immensity in the opening minutes. One of the defining aspects of this astonishing performance was the simple fact that Yamada never tried to smooth the joins, playing off the lighter, more relaxed passages against the more foreboding ones, making the blocks of Bruckner’s structure create an intense narrative tension. An essential part of this was the way it questioned the music’s character, challenging easy assumptions. Was the first movement’s climax triumphant or tempestuous? The ambiguity of the strange string section that followed made everything far from certain, enhanced by a real sense of solemnity from wind and brass in the chorale-like connecting passages. Even at its end, one felt simultaneously elated and terrified.
The central Scherzo: again the polarisation – regular, thundering accents and light flowing lines – and again the determination from Yamada to lean into the strangeness and make it a feature, fearlessly showcasing it.
All of this conveyed the powerful impression of a composer straining to wrangle his music into something clear and coherent, oscillating wildly between emotional poles. Thus the final Adagio, its opening brilliant blaze a seeming red herring in the midst of non-sequiturs and harmonic obliqueness. Here, too, the most telling aspect of the performance was Yamada’s placing of this tension front and centre. Big lyrical eruptions suggested not so much stability as the attempt at it, always subjected to Bruckner’s characteristic changes of mind, volte-faces, recalibrations and hiatuses along the way. In this regard, Yamada even managed to clarify the uncertainty in some sequences that, under other batons, sound straightforward, taken as read. One late brass sequence, in particular, was here rendered such that each successive chord had a slight emphasis that undermined its relationship to the one before and after, superbly challenging their connectivity.
Throughout, though inner details were usually abundantly clear – it was a stunningly vivid performance – Yamada’s emphasis was always on the bigger picture, the symphony’s structural and emotional convolution. It came as no surprise, therefore, that the work’s last tutti was not simply superficial glory but coloured by dark anguish, captured in the famous dominant thirteenth chord that was sustained to become a cry of desperation.
Yet somehow, against the odds, we witnessed an orchestra almost stumbling accidentally onto resolution. Turning inward, becoming fragile, they improbably discovered calm and a hard-won sense of not so much peace as relief. This must have been precisely how Bruckner felt.
