Results tagged “haydn” from Slipped disc

There was mild bemusement among hard-core concertgoers and after-show drinkers at the end of the Vienna Philharmonic performance of Haydn's 98th symphony and Schubert's Great C major under the late-replacement baton of Franz Welser-Möst.

Nothing to do with the playing, which was glorious and impeccable in every respect bar one slightly sour movement fadeout in the Schubert. Nothing to do either with the conductor's interpretation, which was uncluttered, organic and irresistibly energising.

So what was missing? An encore, for starters. Every travelling orchestra carries a quiver of crowd-pleasers and this one, despite prolonged applause, refused to deliver.

Some listeners mentioned a lack of 'greatness' in the performance. That's exactly what I found most refreshing. Any third-rate conductor can posture the big occasion at the Royal Albert Hall, underlining every fat tune and swaggering through the tempo switches in Haydn and Schubert to make them seem magniloquent and meaningful.

Welser-Möst resisted the temptation to over-adorn. This was not so much a big performance as a collegial conversation over a hotel breakfast table, at which conductor and musicians were speaking the language of Haydn and Schubert as mother's tongue, able to leave lines hanging in the air, unresolved, for later contemplation.

It was, for me, a memorable performance and one that augurs well for the future dialogue between this conductor and the orchestra when he takes over next year as chief at the Vienna State Opera.

Welser-Möst, who broke his vacation to save the gig when the venerable Nikolaus Harnoncourt called in sick, has not forgotten his rocky beginnings as 20-something music director of the London Philharmonic. Nor has the press in this town, which is forever urging him to prove a point and erase his early embarrassments. It takes moral courage to resist such challenges and do as he did at the Proms - to dare to perform the great classics as an everyday conversation, without pomp or posturing. Just as the masters intended.

A number of people walked out of Andras Schiff's lecture-recital on Haydn at the Wigmore Hall on Friday night, so I'm told.

The erudite Hungarian pianist is in the chrysallis stage of morphing from concert artist to public intellectual, a transition last successfully achieved by Alfred Brendel.

Schiff's 2006 Beethoven lecture recital was received with rapture by the editor of the Guardian newspaper, himself an avid pianist, and his residence at the Wigmore is one of the hall's outstanding trademarks.

So why did people walk out when Schiff was at full steam? Apparently, it had something to do with the language he used. One young person was heard asking an usher what was meant by 'tonic and dominant tonal relationships'. Others were visibly puzzled by such helpful advisories as 'moving to the minor chord with the altered 5th'.

Musicians in the hall knew exactly what he meant. These are terms they assimilated in first-year college and use among themselves as shorthand, in the way heart surgeons refer to capillaries by letters and numbers. In an academic lecture, these terms would have been perfectly in place. But in a public presentation they sundered those in the know from those without and alienated the curious beyond risk of return. What was intended by the hall as an educational venture achieved the very opposite function.

Musical terminology is often clumsy and seldom irreplaceable. Most things that are done in music can be expressed in words that an unprepared audience will understand. There are plenty of artists who welcome listeners pithily into their world and plenty of critics and writers who advance the process of communication by avoiding technical jargon.

I don't want to single out Andras Schiff as an antedeluvian elitist. He is pursuing an honourable path of enlightenment in the language he knows best. But Schiff should remember that if he invites the public through the door he should speak to them in expressions and metaphors they can readily understand. Using shorthand may be handy among friends, but it always makes strangers feel unwanted.

The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has written a tender-hearted feature about his former schoolteacher, Derek Bourgeois, a composer who claims a British national record for writing the most symphonies.

With 44 in his folder, Bourgeois is well ahead of the unstoppable William Havergal Brian, who composed 32 symphonies, two-thirds of them between the ages of 78 and 96. One of Brian's works, the Gothic, drew a twitter of attention when it was taken up by a member of the Grateful Dead - I once discussed structure and tempo with Phil Lesh - but for the most part these mass-production outpourings seem destined to remain unheard.

Bourgeois, who had an early symphony performed by Adrian Boult, ascribes his neglect to the 'avant-garde', which seems unfair. He is a versatile composer with a solid career. A soundtrack for the BBC's dramatisation of Mansfield Park lingers in my ear and there's a trombone concerto on my shelf, recorded by Christian Lindberg. Does it not occur to him that, as he piles symphony upon symphony, musicians will shy away from sheer volume and give the whole lot a miss?

He is by no means the only man who cannot stop writing symphonies. The Finnish conductor Leif Segerstam, a full-bearded master of orchestras, has composed 215 symphonies, ten of them in the month of August 2008 alone. Segerstam is an exceptionally skilled interpreter, able to pull together a last-mi nute performance with a minimum of fuss. What is it that makes him carry on writing symphonies, and listing them at the Finnish Music Information Centre? Does he not appreciate that a snowball would stand greater chance of success and longevity in Dante's Inferno? 

Myself, I blame Papa Haydn. The format he invented for the symphony is so inviting that, like a cake mould, anyone with the right technique feels obliged to fill it. Haydn wrote 104 symphonies, certainly too many. 'He was the father of us all,' said Mozart. And so say Derek Bourgeois, Leif Segerstam, William Havergal Brian and all.