Rodney Milnes on the score at the Proms
Pierre Boulez lends a welcome air of astringency to the Proms, The popular view of Prom audiences as young people who do not necessarily hear much serious music being served with an enormous quantity (and it is) at extremely reasonable prices (and they are) implies that we oldies must be patient with all the razzmatazz that goes with the series in view of putative poverty and youthful ebullience. Well, here's one oldie who is bored sick with the hoary old jokes that precede and puctuate the concerts — the barks, the tuning hum, the shouts, the darts — that have long lost any spontaneity they may have had.
Aha, say the apologists, but the concentration once the music has started ... Maybe, but would that that 'concentration were more constructive. Neither youth nor poverty is much excuse for the utter indiscrimination of Prom audiences. A conductor who leaned over on the podium and broke wind would probably be cheered to the echo, and indifferent performances (there have to be some in seven weeks of concerts, all of which are on Radio 3) are greeted with the same noisy rapture as the good ones. What is more, the noise starts before ever the music has ended, let alone sunk in, Two minutes silence are as desirable after a Bruckner symphony as they are on Armistice Sunday.
But Boulez seems blissfully unaware of all this, and gets calmly on with his ascetic music-making. He launched the series with as fine a Brahms German Requiem as I have heard. It was the antithesis of the fearfully indulgent, though doubtless sincerely felt, interpretation by Barenboim at Edinburgh last year, being cleantextured and quite innocent of that lugubrious overstatement that can make this a German Requiem in more than just text. The BBC Singers and Choral Society, making every note audible, were discreetly but purposefully accompanied, and soloists Heather Harper and Hermann Prey shone. The performance whetted the appetite for Boulez's version of Mahler's Fourth Symphony the following week.
A new broom, yes, but would that the bristles had been slightly less hard. Here Mahler is at his most childlike in all save verbosity, and he stretches his material to the very limits; the piece needs extra-careful handling if it is not to be a flatulant, faux ridif bore. There are also limits to broomwielding when the composer splatters his score with detailed instructions to the interpreter and leaves little room for manoeuvre. If he says, "don't hurry" (the most frequent marking), then he means it, and it's best to obey him. I felt that Boulez hurried the outer movements dangerously, sacrificing some of the grace and lightness of the first and giving soloist Felicity Palmer a job both to keep up and to shape her line in the last. In the closing pages Mahler demands a return to the original tempo of the movement; at this performance (and in many others, including Bruno Walter's on record) the end was patiently slower: a sure indication that the beginning was too fast.
Elsewhere Boulez took what might seem to be the conductor/composer's privilege of substituting his own effects: " don't drag "became "go faster" — it is not quite the same thing; he accelerated well before being so instructed (bar 341, first movement, and 117, third, if you must know); indulged in violent altargandi where none are required; and paid too little attention to commas passim. Score-follower's nit-picking this may be, but Boulez's Mahler 4 did not seem any more convincing than Mahler's. Although the BBC orchestra achieved that clarity that is a hallmark of Boulez performances, there was some unnecessarily coarse brass playing and, strangest of all, Boulez played up much of the schmalz where he, of all people, might have been ex
pected to do quite the opposite.
Bruckner did not decorate his scores with instructions, though some of his disastrously wellmeaning editors did. Apropos the Seventh symphony, Robert Simpson, in rejecting the spurious fluctuations of tempo in the Nowak edition, writes that "no sensitive conductor is going to march metronomically through Bruckner's music, while the insensitive ones will make grinding changes of gear at every apparently authorised excuse."
Wise words from the expert himself, and would that Sir Georg Sold had heeded them in his Prom performance with the BBC orchestra. Not only did the gear changes in the outer movements compromise the grandiose flow of the music, but the sentimental 'expression ' lavished on individual phrases at the expense of overall shape, the definitely nippy Scherzo that sounded like Elgar and the Trio with a whiff of the Palm Court — all these gave a work that is hewn from granite a curious and rather nasty soft centre which was Viennese in quite the wrong way. Poor Sold had formidable competition, as ever, from Goodall, whose masterly interpretation of the same work with the same orchestra in the same hall two years ago is still ringing in my ears.
Boulez's Brahms, and even his Mahler, were carefully conceived in terms of the Albert Hall acoustic, but it was difficult to imagine how the Messiah performance, heard over Radio 3, would have told there. This was a mini-Messiah, de rigueur nowadays, in what might be described as Basil Lam's mordant edition. Orchestra and choris sounded tiny, and the latter had male altos, though I could not tell if they were all male (no disrespect intended). While I am in principle all in favour of efforts to reconstruct performance characteristics of Handel's time, I wonder whether the Albert Hall is the best place for it, and whether all that relentless twiddling and decoration does not detract from the calm and dignity of the work. In particular, it seems strange when Handel differentiates marginally between a string and a vocal phrase to edit them to be the same; maybe he actually meant them to be different. Largo is not, apparently, a marking in conductor Richard Hickox's repertoire, and his andantes were a brisk walk rather than a stroll. But there were invigorating freshness and accuracy in the fast choruses, and excellent solo singing from Jill Gomez and Philip Lang ridge.
About the use of counter-tenor I am still to be convinced. In Handel opera, James Bowman is unequalled, and I long for the day when Giulio Cesare or Alcina are mounted for him, but in Messiah there are problems of breath control and the lack of sheer ' biff that a good contralto can give to He was despised.' Nevertheless, I hope his obvious success did not mean a vengeful posse of unemployed contraltos lurking in Bacchante-like ambush at the artists' entrance.
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