Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961)
Saturday, October 18, 2025
Berliner Philharmonie, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, Berlin
During the Proms season just gone Simon Rattle should have conducted Lincolnshire Posy but couldn’t, while Janine Jansen did honour her date with this Prokofiev. All was as expected in Berlin for the third evening running. The Grainger is rather more than a collection of folksongs (while being exactly that). What distinguishes it is the imaginative scoring for a large ensemble of woodwinds and brass (with percussion and basses), some juicy harmonies and beyond-duty counterpoint that extend each number’s scope, fully brought out and relished here, not least the (to my mind) lamenting ‘Horkstow Grange’ (No.2 of six) with depth of sonority and chording.
Harmonielehre is somewhat demanding of patience, mine anyway. Even in a humdinger performance, as here, the repetitions of not vey interesting material belted out create indifference, even hostility, very quickly, but the composer carries on regardless, The second movement includes reference to Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, the tortured first-movement climax, which rather eclipses Adams’s own invention, and if the final one builds to a Hollywood-style finish, the insistence of the music is self-defeating. Terrific performance if forty unproductive minutes, although it was very enthusiastically received and there were whoops of delight to greet the opening movement.
The Prokofiev was mysteriously unfolded at the outset – Once Upon a Time – a snowy landscape created, Jansen, Rattle and the orchestra creating rarefied, ethereal textures, contrasted with the scorching second movement in which Jansen indulged curdled tone, and the Finale reached its full-circle conclusion by stealth. Jansen offered a Bach Sonata slow movement as an encore, intense, unvarnished, music with pulling power and consolation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonielehre