There is surely a case for thinking that the list of great Bs – Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner – should be extended to include Bartók. More than perhaps any other composer, with the exception of Vaughan Williams, he helped establish the rich heritage of folk music as an integral element in modern music-making. That awareness is being underlined by a week-long series of concerts at the Elbphilharmonie devoted to Bartók’s most important works. This concert also served to present the new partnership recently announced between the Hannover-based NDR Radiophilharmonie and Stanislav Kochanovsky, who takes over as Principal Conductor at the start of the coming concert season.
When it comes to characterising the music of the “pantomime grotesque” The Miraculous Mandarin, and its concert suite played here as the concluding work, you need a whole armoury of epithets: it is raw, violent, exotic and elemental, frenzied, shot through with moments of lyrical seductiveness. Nothing should sound comfortable. Bartók’s own “shabby little shocker” should grab you by the throat and leave you drained by the close. Except that it didn’t here.
It was obvious that much rehearsal time had been expended on negotiating the technical challenges. Kochanovsky and his orchestra sounded more at ease in the softer moments, chiefly the many swirling clarinet curlicues and instances of unusual sonority involving harp and bassoon. Dynamics were sensitively controlled, from whispered bawdy to fortissimo outcries coming from the serried ranks of woodwind and brass. Yet even here those essential qualities of savagery and brutality felt mediated: the brass section had confidence, but not much capacity to wail and scream. Nor did the strings match the turbulence from other sections: the second violins failed to deliver full power at the start and the jagged, razor-sharp viola line simply didn’t have enough heft.
Earlier, in Bartók’s Two Pictures, efficiency rather than character predominated. In the first section, In full flower, the heat was turned up a little too quickly, with the woodwind too loud at the outset when set against the throbbing strings. This is where Debussy’s impressionistic influence most patently asserts itself. Indeed, some of the orchestration is quite magical, with harp arpeggios and tubular bells adding flecks of colour at one point to becalmed strings. In the second section, Village Dance, there was plenty of robust earthiness.
The first half saw the focus fall on the composer’s Second Violin Concerto (until the discovery of the First, thought to be his only such work), in which the soloist was the Ukrainian Valeriy Sokolov. A very physical player, often using his whole body to give extra emphasis, he gave an authoritative account of the piece. He revelled in the verbunkos dance rhythms, and with his bright, steel-edged tone savoured the virtuosity of the first movement cadenza, consisting almost entirely of double stops and chords, as well as the helter-skelter scales in the Finale. There was a soft and dreamy opening to the central Andante tranquillo, though this example of Bartók’s night music demonstrated little terror lurking in the shadows. The sudden shivers that run through the orchestral accompaniment needed to be more pronounced, an example of the over-cautious playing which troubled me repeatedly. There is an idiomatic quality to Bartók which is instantly recognisable. It is not enough to play all the notes and follow the dynamic markings. You have to be inside the music and feel it from within. Here, and in the later orchestral pieces, where there were issues of ensemble, it struck me that Kochanovsky still has a lot of work to do in Hannover.
