Photo, Chris Christodoulou
Sunday, July 30, 2023
Royal Albert Hall, London
Prokofiev’s Third Symphony is one of his very greatest works, as is The Fiery Angel, an opera not staged during the composer’s lifetime, hence him rescuing some terrific music for the concert work – unearthly, sinister, clangorous, thrillingly climactic. Gustavo Gimeno (music director in Luxembourg and Toronto) rather held back at the beginning, softening the edges while exploiting the score’s inner workings, the BBCSO very responsive, vivid certainly if a little soft-grained, not uncompromising enough, if ideal for the eerie impressionism of the second movement. The surreptitious scurrying (aleatoric in effect) of the Scherzo-like successor with the ‘trio’ glowing darkly were also persuasive, the return of the opening music intensified with ghostly knocking. The Finale mirrored the reservations noted for first movement and, anyway, it’s difficult to forget the performance given during Proms 2016 by this Orchestra conducted by the much-missed Covid-claimed Alexander Vedernikov.
Hollywood featured in the first half, beginning with some of Bernard Herrmann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958, with James Stewart and Kim Novak), immediately nightmarish, troubled tension sustained in this graphic and widescreen realisation, the BBCSO strings especially impressive, images conjured, leaving no doubt that the movie is a “psychological thriller” and that the leading characters’ love will end tragically.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto (1947, premiered and recorded by Heifetz) – replacing the UK premiere of Mason Bates’s Piano Concerto, soloist Daniil Trifonov having withdrawn – shares with earlier material used by Korngold when scoring movies. It’s a generously melodic and suggestive work, which Vadim Gluzman played ardently if sometimes with strained tone and slightly off intonation, and the odd difficulty, if spinning an embracing line in the slow movement (the rapt atmosphere disrupted by clapping), the BBCSO and Gimeno inveigling the listener with carefully crafted details, dynamics and tints. The rollicking Finale was beneficially articulate, a credits-rolling grandeur, and an exciting dash to the finishing post, following which Gluzman played the deeply expressive Serenade by his fellow-Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov, for which time stood still. Haunting.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001p1zb
https://www.colinscolumn.com/released-today-june-30-on-chandos-music-by-bernard-herrmann-wuthering-heights-echoes-with-singapore-symphony-orchestra/
https://www.colinscolumn.com/bernard-herrmann/
I should just like to correct the apparently never-ending misunderstandings of the genesis of Korngold’s Violin Concerto, that the work was based on from themes lifted from his earlier film scores. Colin Anderson was correct in his review above, although the idea is, of course, seen all over the place, in books and sleeve notes and reviews, but this overlooks the research Brendan Carroll did on this for his book, “The Last Prodigy: A Biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold”. Brendan explains that the truth could very well be the other way around, and pointed out that Korngold actually started work on this concerto contemporaneously with his film work, when he was back in Vienna in late 1936, after A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Captain Blood and before The Prince and the Pauper and Juarez. We know this from an interview he gave at the time to the Viennese newspaper Das Echo.
It is also known that the genesis for the work sprang from a suggestion from his father, the famous (and infamous) music critic Julius Korngold, who after seeing Another Dawn in the cinema in late 1936 observed that its main theme would make a marvellous idea for a Violin Concerto. This comment was apparently the spur. We also know (from the memoirs of Erich’s widow Luzi) that he “sketched the whole piece out very quickly”, as he often did when he has inspired. He then asked a family friend, Robert Pollak (a violinist but not a very good one), to try it through with him.
Pollack’s performance was so poor that Korngold apparently lost confidence in the work and set it aside. Then the Anschluss happened and the rest is history. That early version does not survive among his manuscripts and was probably lost when the house in Vienna was broken into by the Nazis in the summer of 1938 and many of his original manuscripts were destroyed. The materials for the sketched concerto were part of what was lost. By then, of course, he was exiled in the US.
Korngold returned to his concerto project in 1945 as the war ended, at the behest of the violinist Bronislaw Huberman, and the rest of the story is known. While the loss of the original manuscript materials means that one cannot be completely sure, it does seem likely that the Pauper and Juarez themes were in the concerto first, and were adapted for film use later. Adverse was written earlier. It would also possibly explain why there are those deliberate thematic similarities between the Another Dawn theme and the Pauper theme, though frankly, Korngold’s melodic style is highly interrelated between works in any case. Korngold’s work now ranks as the most popular of all 20th Century violin concertos with over 70 recordings listed in the catalogue; as recently as a decade ago, it clocked up almost 2000 performances worldwide in 2013 alone!
Coincidentally, Petroc Trelawney peddled much of the disinformation when presenting this live Prom that featured the concerto (Gluzman played it quite well, in spite of many errors, as Colin noted). Trelawney appeared to be reading from the programme, which implied the persistent, snide view that Korngold just “recycled” themes from his film music.
Even allowing that the main theme of the first movement is originally from Another Dawn and that of the second movement is from Anthony Adverse, the material is treated so differently and developed with such considerable and continuous extemporisation and variation throughout, that it cannot be regarded as merely being lifted from one score & dropped into another. Moreover, the instrumentation is also completely different. The music is recomposed if anything! However, Schott has now given the date of the concerto as 1937/45 in the newly published reprint of the score and a brief introductory text draws on Brendan Carroll’s research.
Errors in the booklet were pointed out ahead of publication. A futile gesture when the finished product managed to get the chronology of pretty much ALL the later works hopelessly muddled. Not that the Herrmann bio was any better.