Spanning the centuries with Andrew Manze at the Elbphilharmonie

There have been many close relationships between British conductors and German orchestras, including four illustrious knights (Colin Davis in both Dresden and Munich, Gardiner in Hamburg, Rattle in Berlin and Norrington in Stuttgart). More recently, Andrew Manze has been developing his profile in core repertory with the NDR Radiophilharmonie in Hanover, of which he has been the Principal Conductor since 2014. Few, however, have devoted an entire evening to British composers featuring no obvious crowd-pleasers (the greater variety of repertory in German subscription concerts notwithstanding), so that this concert with the NDR Elbphilharmonieorchester was something of an exception.

It was quite fitting that a few days after the British Remembrance Sunday and before this coming Sunday’s German equivalent (Volkstrauertag) Manze chose to open with Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. Grave and sombre in mood to chime in with the misty air and gunmetal grey of the skies above Hamburg, one potent line from the Book of Common Prayer that Purcell set to music stood out and formed a thematic bridge to the two 20th-century works which made up the rest of the programme: “In the midst of life we are in death”.

Walton’s Cello Concerto was one of the last major pieces he wrote, commissioned by Gregor Piatigorsky, and for which the composer was paid the then princely sum of $3000. As he said in typically tongue-in-cheek fashion at the time, “I write anything for anybody, if they pay me. Naturally, I write much better if I am paid in American dollars.” The more often I hear it, the more I am struck by the valedictory quality of its bittersweet melodies and haunting harmonies. It is almost as though Walton felt that his time was slowly slipping away as rivals were busy edging him aside. The work opens to ticking sounds from the pizzicato strings, a device later transferred to brass and woodwind and in the finale to glockenspiel and harp in an extraordinary touch of inventiveness, almost as a kind of pre-echo to the clicks and whirring present in Shostakovich’s final symphony. Very soon after the first entry of the soloist there is a sense of death-inspired longing, in a direct quotation from Tristan. The clarity of the Elbphilharmonie’s acoustics allowed such effects to come across with startling directness, but it also exposed the occasional imprecisions in the orchestral accompaniment.

Alban Gerhardt made a fine advocate of this concerto and he was alive to its many quixotic changes in mood. In the opening movement he and Manze often emphasised the extrovert qualities, the ebullience and unbuttoned energy in the writing, the extravagant gestures and ear-pricking detail that Walton often rolled out without much prompting, almost to the detriment at times of the inwardness which I think is also present in the score. Gerhardt’s technique and expressive range were displayed to great advantage in the two cadenzas in the finale – the first more impassioned, the second more ruminative – and especially towards the close, where the instrument slowly winds down before slipping into its deepest register and coming to rest on a sonorous concluding C.

In 1938 Vaughan Williams travelled across the North Sea to receive the city of Hamburg’s Shakespeare Prize and heard his London Symphony conducted at the award ceremony by none other than Eugen Jochum. It opens with the kind of atmospheric mood-painting often associated with Ravel and Delius (and Debussy too, for that matter), a kind of aural equivalent to the depictions of London by Turner, Monet and Whistler. The trouble is that in an overly clinical ambience the mysterious and nebulous sounds that the composer almost certainly had in mind lose their breadth and charm. In the second movement, the mood of which Vaughan William likened to “Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon”, a large number of wind and brass solos were projected at too high a dynamic level, drenching the textures in primary colours rather than touching in pastel shades. By far the most successful movement was the bustling scherzo, where Manze’s energy-laden direction maintained a strong sense of momentum in the skipping rhythms. He coaxed forth its innate sense of playfulness but also gave full expression to the dark and dreamy content of the Nocturne section. What remained in the ear from the finale were those forward-looking elements so easily forgotten in a work essentially pastoral in conception: the anguished cry from the full orchestra at the outset, the stroke of the tam-tam with its deathly significance and the ghostly sonorities of the trumpets that give way to the solo violin in the dying moments of the movement. It is hard to overlook the epigrammatic nature of the composer’s inspiration which he drew from a sentence by H.G. Wells: “The river passes – London passes – England passes.”