Wednesday’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert was an evening that challenged expectations. This was largely down to the approach taken by Sir Mark Elder, who struck a balance between carefulness and spontaneity.
In Brahms’ Piano Concerto no. 1 in D minor, it was as if he’d made a pact with Sir Stephen Hough to reinvent the work on the fly. Part of this was to reimagine Brahms not as the usual polite romanticist but as more of a melodramatic firebrand. Elder suffused the music with high drama from the start, one minute all force and fire, the next semi-suspended, searching and sighing. This created a grand sense of scope, our perspective shifting from the large canvas to mining deep lyrical seams barely hinted at hitherto. Yet the greatest reinvention was the relationship between piano and orchestra. In the opening Maestoso Hough was less the mouthpiece of the work than a commentator on it, suggesting a symphony and concerto combined. However, his role was far from passive, instigating ideas enthusiastically taken up by the orchestra. For the central Adagio, adopting a tone of smoothness and mystery, Hough assumed priority to the extent that it now suggested a sonata and concerto combined. Only in the final movement did they present a pure concerto demeanour, full embracing the idiom with a tremendous air of fun, Hough at last an unequivocal soloist, leading the narrative thrust while the orchestra elaborated around him.
It was the composer himself who challenged expectations in Janáček’s short meditation The Fiddler's Child. Inspired by a folk tale, Elder simply allowed it to speak as the strange, darkly-conflicted music that it is. Gothic, tender, neutral, festive, folk-like, rushing, lyrical, brusque, all of these moods jostled together in close proximity while the make-up of the orchestra itself kept shifting: tutti, assorted individuals, four violas, a gang of winds, one lone bassoon. Here was not a conventional narrative but a deconstruction of one, the fragments of its drama being reassembled into an unstable yet coherent expression of complex mixed emotions. Elder and the CBSO articulated the work with such understated drama that it paradoxically hit all the harder.
Symphonies need to be heard on their own terms, yet there was a distinct implication in the performance of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony that it was in the wake of the composer’s Fifth. As such, where that work is emotionally wrought, suffused with bitter irony and sarcasm, here we found ourselves in a very much milder place. The initial soaring, searing melodic intensity was answered by soft ruminations that, if not exactly internalised, felt nonetheless deeply intimate. The CBSO rendered these passages utterly transparent, superbly balancing the multiple lines in its complex counterpoint. As in the Janáček, Elder established a sublime liminality of warm and cool, never neutral, never over-emotional. The result was nicely hard to read, even when it descended into the most spine-tingling tremulous hush.
In hindsight, this acted as something of a palate cleanser, enabling both of the symphony’s brief fast movements to speak with ever greater quantities of élan. The Allegro had genuine lightness and play, without a trace of grotesque or irony, though here too Elder ensured the orchestra measured their excitement through its more thoughtful sequences, giving the music a fittingly mindful momentum. Though the reins didn’t come off in the closing Presto, the CBSO held little back in what was a full-blooded, passionate, united chorus of galloping merriment, crowned by dazzling, fantastical rapid runs from the winds. Any expectations of Soviet-enforced sarcasm were here trounced by the impression of music just a hair’s breadth away from true, genuine happiness.
