Without any obvious connecting theme other than a trio of 20th-century works written within a few years of each other, this BBC Symphony concert at the Barbican drew together a choral rarity and two popular orchestral gems. With such strong vocal, pianistic and orchestral contrasts, it all promised to be an exciting evening. And so much of it proved to be.
Bartók’s Cantata Profana (1930) is moderately well represented on disc, but it’s hardly a repertoire work for choirs within the UK, not helped by its taxing vocal parts, including much contrapuntal choral writing, and some uncompromisingly high lines for tenor and baritone soloists. Indeed, Bartók wrote the score with no prospect of it being performed. Based on traditional Transylvanian ballads and here sung in Romanian, it narrates the tale of a hunter’s nine sons who are magically transformed into stags before their integration into the natural world. Balance issues, noted at its 1934 London premiere given by the Wireless Chorus and BBCSO, were no less problematic here with Ukrainian-born Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska allowing the orchestra to dominate the hard working, but frequently overpowered BBC Symphony Chorus. Had words been more clearly projected and rhythms more clearly defined, the work’s pagan element might have come into sharper focus. Miklós Sebestyén (bass-baritone) and Robin Tritschler (tenor), as father and son respectively, were impassioned in their solo contributions, manfully facing their extreme pitches.
The work’s disturbing mood was well caught and found sinister correspondences in the subterranean opening of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (1930), where murky lower strings and a sinister contrabassoon launched a tension-filled account with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet a magisterial soloist. He found an agreeable balance between uninhibited drama and flamboyance – at one point almost leaping off the piano stool to achieve greater power – and dreamy introspection, together making for a compelling collaboration with the BBC players. The piano’s declamatory first entry was remarkably authoritative, its bravura and nobility yielding to tender ruminations and mechanistic eruptions, Bavouzet totally at ease with the concerto’s formidable demands. A crisply articulated Allegro section brought scintillation and a searchingly expressive cadenza, with intimacy and nostalgia uppermost. Ravel’s distinctive timbres were vividly outlined with beguiling contributions from bassoon and trombone, timpani imposing but never dominating, Stasevska generating a detailed and involving performance. As an encore, Bavouzet gave further evidence of his flawless technique in two movements (Prélude and Toccata) from Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin
There followed Janáček’s five-movement Sinfonietta. If anyone knows how to write a fanfare, it's this Czech composer. Improbable as it may seem, the work began life in 1926 as a series of brass and percussion fanfares for a gymnastics festival, later developing into the work as it exists today. Dedicated to the Czechoslovak Armed Forces – Janáček often referred to it as a “Military Sinfonietta”, conceived to express “contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his courage, strength and determination to fight for victory”. That may be so, but this exhilarating reading was an arresting fusion of heart-on-sleeve lyricism and periodic hysteria, Janáček’s obsessive patterns and impulsive outbursts graphically presented and nowhere more gaudily than those wild exchanges between flutes and trombones in the Moderato. Altogether, a well-paced account with the work’s pageantry especially stirring.
