Biblical stint •
MUSIC CHARLES REID
This is the point at which we usually begin to sort out our Proms impressions. Or, better still, begin letting them sort themselves out.
Forme one persisting memory is a small piece on the opening night, Mendelssohn's G minor Scherzo, written when he was sixteen as a string octet but rescored and slotted into his early C minor Symphony. Angels danced and winked on the point of a pin. Swiftness, insubstantiality, magic. Was it that Colin Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra happened to be in such mercurial form that nothing could go wrong? Or that an enchantment not heard for years automatically knocked me over? Perhaps some- thing of both. But the particular merit of the G.,minor Scherzo is that it is just music, doesn't pretend to be anything else and doesn't need to. Me for 'magic' and escapism, if it amounts to that, every time.
By every time I don't mean the thing happens often. I missed it badly the night Frederick Prausnitz (German-born American) conducted Messiaen's Et exspecto resurrectionent. On the platform sat a phalanx of brass and woodwind (no strings) backed by just about everything bashable and strikable and clickable that human ingenuity has devised. The entire 'magic' kit and witches' cauldron, in short. My final impres- sion, for all the fancy timbres, textures and 'note dusters,' strengthened the one 1 got from Boulez's superbly engineered CBS recording of the piece. The loud, stark brass unisons, the dolled-up birdsong arabesques for woodwind and, above all, the finale's pounding four beats to the bar often sounded too trite to be true. The intercalated Scriptural texts instead of mending matters made them a shade worse by contrast.
There have been two other Scriptural nights. The St John's Passion Music of Bach was eon- ducted by Benjamin Britten in a translation from the German by Peter Pears and imogen Hoist that abounded in misplaced verbal slis-sses. 'Take away him, crucify him!' it!gg-1.;ted a finger-jabbing overseer and suboi dina Les who had collared the wrong man. The Si Luke's Passion (1966) of Krzssztof Pend- erecki (Polish), incorporating an earlier Stabat Mater of his, was fervently and brilliantly done by BBC choral and orchestral forces. The con- ductor (Henryk Czyz) and the soloists (Stefania Woytowicz, Andrzej Hiolski and Bernard Ladysz) were those who took part in the Mfinster premiere and who are heard in the recording recently put out by Philips (SAL 3613-14, four sides).
I will not deny that a point came in the Penderecki (as it often does, so far a, I am con- cerned, in both the Bach Passions) where a sort of holy boredom supervened. On the way to the immense and radiant final chord on 'Deus veritatis' (an indisputably 'common one, E flat major, in a predominantly atonal score), we passed through such utter tenebrae ('shadows' is too mild a word) that once or twice 1 shifted rest- lessly in my seat.
The final impression; however, is of awe. This for a number of reasons. When he has occasion to. Penderecki makes his orchestra and chorus stir, twitter, shimmer, squeal and blockbust as cunningly as any of the post-I950 athematists, not in an abstract way but with close relevance to the turns of his text. Sts les which range back through Schoenbergian counterpoint to plainsong are spateheocked with uncommon mastery. But not the sort of mastery that precludes simple strokes.
On the words 'Deus rneus' in the Mount of Olives scene, the solo baritone comes back again and again in varying keys with a live-note phrase within the compass of a minor third which bears a mark of greatness: con- gruent gravity. It is not, after all, music's business to 'express' the emotions of Life. That goes for • transcendental Life as much as for the life we go on plodding from day :o day. What we may demand, 'however, is that when music is welded to great words and immense events it shall, stti generis, be of equivalent class or something like it. That. it strikes me, is how it is with the 'Meals dens' phrase and the choral number which it per- vades and dominates. All sweat and anguish, the words recur with a sort of divine oh- stinaey and obsession. Penderecki's five notes consort with their meaning so profoundly yet so .simply that I am reminded of Messiah. I don't suppose the average Messiah fancier from the average chapel in Wales or the West Riding would make much at first hearing of The Passion Acrording. to St-Luke as a whole. But I'm confident he'd see the point and depth of the Mount of Olives music straight away.
It seems that Penderecki is a believer. as Handel was. That doesn't necessarily account for the music of either. Perhaps belief makes 3 difference, however. As the third point of our triangle, Bach raises comparisons of a different order. At certain points his Si John text con- verges or coincides with that of Penderecki. allowance being made for the different languages they were setting. A case in point k the passage in both scores which narrates the dividing and casting of lots for Christ's gar- ments. In Penderecki this is disposed of curtly. He has the words muttered mezza-voce by a section of his versatile triple choir--who. inci- dentally, are expected not only to sing note- clusters and be dead on the note in polyphonies without tonal sheet-anchor but also to whisper, whistle, hiss, up-whine, down-whine, jazzily imitate plucked strings and split their sides with scornful laughter. . . . Bach, on the other hand. spreads himself exuberantly. In his St John the lots are cast in fifty odd bars of resilient choral allegro, triple time, with the sort of effect com- monly described as gleeful and malign. Mr Britten got a brilliantly pointed performance of this number from the Ambrosian Singers. who were required also to tackle several of the chorales at brisk, no-damn-nonsense speeds which blew away many a cobweb without exactly convincing me that I was in at a revelation.
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