This programme from Les Siècles and founder conductor François-Xavier Roth was very much, to borrow from football parlance, a game of two halves. Each featured a single composer (nothing unusual there) but inhabited a separate pitch centre with two sets of instruments to reflect the different periods of composition. Parallel to the change from modern to period instruments, came a corresponding difference in balance, timbre and weight which, within the vast space of the Royal Albert Hall, brought mixed results.
The evening’s first half showcased early and late Ligeti with two works written either side of his escape from Communist Hungary in 1956. His Concert Românesc – here receiving its first complete performance at the BBC Proms – is a folk-influenced work from 1951 originally conceived for the Hungarian Soldiers’ Orchestra but rejected by officialdom for being too dissonant. It’s a day out in the country – specifically Transylvania – with its imitation of Alpine horns (on and off stage) and rustic dance festivities with a feisty violin solo. Both its lively wit and brief excursion into bi-tonality provided a clue as to the musical direction Ligeti was to travel in the coming years.
And some 40 years later appeared the hallucinogenic carnival that is his Violin Concerto, now a stable of the violinist’s repertoire despite its huge challenges. No car horns or metronomes here but a demonstration of Ligeti’s continuing penchant for the unconventional, bringing a parade of effects that the soloist Isabelle Faust describes as a “a traffic jam of musical ideas”. Aside from the work’s century-hopping influences from Southeast Asia, Thelonious Monk, Harry Partch and Shostakovich (his Fourth Symphony), Ligeti throws in everything but the kitchen sink to exploit new sonorities that famously arise from three ocarinas, Swanee whistles and several alternative string tunings that, together, provide the aural equivalent of wearing someone else’s spectacles.
Faust gave a poised and seriously considered account, traversing the barely audible undulating contours of the Praeludium through to the final movement’s cadenza (courtesy of Oscar Strasnoy) and explosive final bars. There was a beguiling tenderness in the Aria, high-wire scintillation in the Intermezzo, while the Passacaglia brought glacial intensity, its accumulating tensions generating a bewildering sonic landscape. No less virtuosic were the 27 musicians of Les Siècles (eleven strings, seven woodwinds, four brass and five percussionists), who were exemplary collaborators, fully equal to Ligeti’s anarchic and arresting score. Faust returned to the platform for György Kurtág’s Dolorosa from his Signs, Games and Messages – sweetly atmospheric, if somewhat lost in this cavernous venue.
And so to two late masterpieces from Mozart. Proceedings began with his Piano Concerto no. 23 in A major, K488, with Alexander Melnikov playing on a barely visible fortepiano situated between the conductor and the orchestra, with woodwinds and horns standing. Not much thought for balance given such gentle tinkling from the keyboard where one had to strain one’s ears at times to the soloist. With the work’s sunny disposition compromised, the outer movements seemed like watercolours, with only the poetry of the central movement (where Mozart makes a singular use of F sharp minor) bringing sustenance in its delightful woodwind contributions.
Performances of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony can be life-affirming experiences. Here, Roth fashioned a forthright account, its festive element underlined in black marker pen with silky strings and tangy woodwinds competing with an unrelenting timpanist intent on being the star attraction for the Finale. Elsewhere, this was a shapely if highly individual performance, but why so many pauses?
