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 CBSO'S TRIO OF MUSICAL EXILES TRIUMPH


CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★
There was a lot of fine classical music being played in America during the 1930s and 1940s, a great deal of it composed, and conducted, by expatriate Europeans. Moviegoers could thrill to the swashbuckling soundtracks of Korngold and dab their eyes to the lush romantic weepies of Max Steiner.In the concert hall works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Martinu were performed and America's premier orchestras were conducted by Szell, Reiner, Steinberg, Toscanini and Ormandy. They came not just in pursuit of financial rewards, many were escaping from political oppression by the Nazis and their fascist imitators in Hungary and Italy, and from Stalin's communist Russia. The three composers featured in this entertaining and expertly played concert are cases in point. The German composer Paul Hindemith's music was labelled "degenerate" by the Nazis so he and his half-Jewish wife arrived in America in 1940. Hindemith's musical star has waned since the 1960s yet his concertos and orchestral music, including a symphony derived from his operatic masterpiece 'Mathis der Maler', are enjoyable and musically rewarding. Thanks then to Kazuki Yamada for opening the concert with Hindemith's 'Symphonic Metamorphosis of the Themes by Carl Maria von Weber', not snappily named but very snappily played. The opening Allegro sounds like the composer's functional 'Kammermusik' style with a great deal energetic bustle suggesting that Hindemith's business is busyness but there's pleasure to be derived from the ingenuity and dexterity which he exhibits in opposing and combining the orchestra's sections, this is a master craftsman at work. A sparkling scherzo, with a snazzy syncopated brass and an Andantino giving flautist Marie-Christine Zupancic the limelight, culminates in a March finale. Yamada let the percussion and brass sections off the leash and their final thunderous sign-off - a rare play-to-the-gallery moment from Hindemith - deserved the audience's enthusiastic applause and a double bow.
I enjoy Rachmaninoff's symphonies but believe that his finest orchestral work is the concise not-a-surplus-note 'Symphonic Dances'. Likewise it's not his large scale second and third piano concertos, popular as they are, that most appeal but the finely wrought scintillating 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini', 24 Variations, each a diamond, displayed for us in as many minutes. The Argentine pianist Nelson Goerner's playing, sturdy, compact and undemonstrative (like the man himself) was very satisfying, each variation exquisitely framed, held up to the light and allowed to sparkle. Rachmaninoff's 'Dies Irae' motto theme, his dark trademark, made its sinister appearance, like a cloaked cinematic villain. Goerner made the famous Andante Cantabile of Variation 18 luscious but not cloying or treacly, the CBSO strings soaring and sighing in sympathy. No wonder that Rachmaninoff joked that, "This one is for my agent", he knew a winner when he heard it. The final variation is the most demanding for the pianist, the composer needed a bracing Crème de Menthe before playing it in concert for the first time but Goerner masterfully handled its changing moods capping it off with Rachmaninoff's brilliant choice of a flippant, throwaway ending, a surprise that still merits an audience chuckle.. Goerner is an exponent of Brahms' "Paganini Variations', for solo piano, and he chose the composer's Intermezzo Op.118 No.2 in A major as an encore. Its wistful meditative mood, the music aspiring upwards but subsiding with a dying fall, kept a packed Symphony Hall audience in silent thrall until a well-merited outburst of applause.
America gave the mortally-ill Hungarian exile Bela Bartók a financial lifeline with a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra's expatriate Russian maestro Sergei Koussevitzky. It was no payday hackwork but Bartók's most popular orchestral work, the Concerto for Orchestra, without the menace of the 'Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta' or the ferocity of 'The Miraculous Mandarin', but the perfect summation of his orchestral skill and musical personality. It's a great showcase for talented players like the CBSO and it showed off Yamada's strengths, a flair for orchestral colour and rhythmic precision. The deadpan introduction has a naïve 'Once upon a time...' appeal and the 'Giuoco delle coppie' was splendid. I fondly remember the CBSO's series of illustrated lecture-cum-concerts and when this was performed the players marched on stage in pairs. We lacked the visual element but the playing was full of charm and wit and a reminder that the CBSO now has high-class pairs of players throughout its wind section. The Elegia's sombre folk-inflected music, surely Bartok's expression of longing for his home-country, was succeeded by a raucous and brazen 'Intermezzo interrotto' with a delightfully lubricious musical raspberry from the orchestra, topped off by a whirligig presto finale.
Norman Stinchcombe

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