BARTOK
TONIGHT!
The
Philharmonic Orchestra
Victoria
Concert Hall
Friday
(3 April 2015 )
This review was published in The Straits Times on 6 April 2015 with the title "Painless Bartok".
We are now living in the second decade of
the 21st century yet there are pockets of audiences that still display
an aversion to 20th century music. One music teacher once told this
reviewer she was leaving a concert early, hoping to avoid sitting through a
work by the great 20th century Hungarian composer Bela Bartok
(1881-1945). This concert by The Philharmonic Orchestra (TPO) conducted by Lim
Yau would have been the perfect remedy of that typical case of Bartok-phobia.
TPO in its Composers Tonight! series has
successfully wedded concert music with a highly engaging musical education
approach, helmed by the witty actor-director William Ledbetter in collaboration
with Lim Yau. His deliveries of pre-performance preambles have been unstuffy,
refreshingly free of technical jargon while being factually sound and accurate.
With Bartok, he dwelled on the composer's passion for collecting and preserving
folk music, which in turn influenced the use of vernacular melodies, harmonies
and rhythms in his music.
The audience was provided with a short
“sampler” in Bartok's Romanian Dances,
the most painless possible introduction to his supposedly difficult style.
Short but quaintly rhythmic, these miniatures brought out some excellent solo
playing from the clarinet, piccolo and concertmaster Chan Yoong Han's violin.
This was merely the prelude to Bartok's Concerto
for Orchestra, his most popular large scale work which showcased groups of
solo instruments in virtuosic roles while being intregral parts of the
orchestra.
Snippets from each of the five movements
were aired alongside Ledbetter's humorous descriptions, even if spoilers
related to Bartok's uproarious in-joke of the fourth movement (best appreciated
by American audiences in 1944 who were then in the thrall of Shostakovich's
patriotic Seventh Symphony) were
divulged.
Then without much ceremony, the work
began.
A more experienced orchestra might have
crafted a more mysterious subterranean opening, but the opening movement's
themes influenced by Hungarian folk music with its use of fourths were well
delineated. The chorus of brass fanfares at its climax also provided the
movement's high point . Clearly this was to be
a field day for both woodwinds and brass, whose prowess continued into the
second movement's Game of Couples.
Here, duets of bassoons, oboes,
clarinets, flutes and trumpets playing in various fixed intervals were
highlighted to best effect, alongside a sole drummer in the middle beating out
rhythmic asides. The middle movement, an Elegy,
was eerily evocative with the piccolo piping out its version of midnight wind, twittering
insects and the call of the wild.
The fourth movement's Interrupted Intermezzo with its trite
village humour and parody of Shostakovich (who himself lampooned Franz Lehar
and the Nazis) was not milked for its shock value, but the intended effect
would have been mostly lost on modern audiences anyway.
All the stops were pulled for the
finale's perpetuum mobile, which
found the strings on imperious form. Again, the driving rhythms of folk music
held sway as the music barrelled its way to a brilliant finish. The various
groups of soloists and chatty host were congratulated by the maestro, and
judging by the applause, all who attended must had felt the concert and
Ledbetter's “music lesson” could not have been better led.
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