A Night at the Concert Hall

My beloved and I went to the National Concert Hall to attend a concert. As we arrived we saw that a red carpet had been rolled out. "Oh, you shouldn't have!" I said, before being shoved roughly over to a side entrance. Once inside, rumour revealed that the President would be joining us for what was going to be the last concert of the National Symphony Orchestra's latest season.

In the auditorium there was the usual palaver as the orchestra came onstage - and then a very exciting moment as the President came to sit in his special seat while the orchestra played a mini version of the national anthem. After that it was straight into the real action.

First up it was Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. I was not sure I had ever heard it before, but once it started I remembered it as the opener of that dreadful Hooked on Classics record and was half expecting a primitive drum machine beat to kick in. Thankfully this did not happen. Instead we got Kirill Gerstein giving us great piano. He also did great piano faces, which was just as well as the low angle of our seats meant that the piano obscured much of the rest of the orchestra from our view.

And when they had finished that, Mr Gerstein treated us to an encore of more piano stuff from Rachmaninov. I do not think I have ever seen an encore at the Concert Hall before, so I was excited.

After the interval, the main event was Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5. This work is one of the great come-backs in history. Previous to it, Shosty had written the score for the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, but Stalin had taken a dislike to its dischordant rhythms. Pravda ran an editorial denouncing the work, with the wonderful title of "Muddle Instead of Music" and Shostakovich found himself in big trouble. The 5th Symphony (apparently billed by Shostakovich as "a Soviet artist's response to justified criticism") was his attempt to write music that would find official favour while at the same time remaining true enough to his artistic vision.

I am not particularly familiar with this piece, though I realise now that I have heard it before. It opens with stirring chords sampled to great effect on Morrissey's 'The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils' and I think also it was played as a soundtrack to a screening of The Battleship Potemkin some years ago.

With the first two movements of this I did find myself thinking that if this how discordant Shostakovich would go when trying to play nice then maybe Stalin had a point with Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. The music also has that generally stirring quality I associate with Shotakovich's symphonic works and the music of the mid 20th century.

The third movement slows everything down and was apparently considered so sadface when the piece premiered that people wept in their seats while it played - with the music bringing to mind the victims of Stalin's Red Terror, then at its height. The poignant association with the Terror may or may not have been intended by Shostakovich. He certainly was not so stupid as to ever to say to anyone that his intention was to memorialise Stalin's victims, but the association probably helped him in retrospect as the mournfulness of this section allows him to escape accusations of churning out up-tempo kitsch for the regime.

The final movement is all bombastic fanfare and makes for a great end to the piece. Some have said that this is Shostakovich attempting to parody the stock forms of socialist realist music. There is no real way of knowing this and even if there was it is a question that is no longer directly relevant to ourselves. I found myself responding to the piece more directly, as a suitably climactic end to a great evening of music.

The concert was also the last performance of violinist Alan Smale as its leader. He has been a key part of performances by the National Symphony Orchestra for as long as I can remember, so seeing him go does mark the end of an era. I gave him one of my rare standing ovations.

links:

Shostakovich image
Muddle instead of Music

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From Jazz to Tchaikovsky

I am listening to The Thing play their album "Mono" on my iPod. I suppose I should really say something about it but anything I say will probably be along the lines of "It sounds a bit jazzy and forward thinking, with a lot of distraught parping", not really the kind of thing that would get me a spot as a guest-reviewer in Jazz Express. Likewise for the record I have by Tim Berne's Snake Oil (which is called Snake Oil). So maybe I will skip on to something else. Like my recent visit to the National Concert Hall.

I was there with my beloved and another mysterious lady for a performance of a number of pieces by the RTE National Symphony Orchestra. First up were some excepts from Swan Lake by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Everyone knows this music to at least some extent, with the music used for the grand finale being particularly famous now thanks to popular film The Black Swan. So I will not bother saying too much about. However, I was struck by a short interlude of quiet and peaceful music just before the end - not so much the music itself, but what it reminded me of, which was one of those special moments you get in songs by SCOOTER, where it all goes quiet and you imagine that you are at some monster rave and everyone is hands in the air, feeling the vibe, and then HP Baxter comes in with a "Yeah" and the beats kick in again and everyone goes mental. Well, HP Baxter did not come in with a "Yeah" in the National Concert Hall but the sudden return to the loud music of the finale was nevertheless a bit reminiscent of Germany's finest.

Then there was the world premiere of a piece called The Binding of the Years, by Irish/Northern Irish composer Deirdre Gribbin. I am not familiar with Ms Gribbin and her work, but the piece she composed was both interesting and entertaining. It was based on some kind of funny religious practice thing they had in the empire of the Aztecs. It was all a bit discordant (in a good way, obv.), calling to my mind The Rite of Spring without at any time sounding like it. Ms Gribbin received some enthusiastic applause from the audience (unlike the other composers on the bill she is still alive and thus able to take her bows) and I was happy that great contemporary music was being performed on the main stage of the concert hall, on a prime music night.

Third on the bill was Leos Janácek's 1926 Sinfonietta. It is a five movement piece, with each bit having something to recommend itself before they all join together in the grand finale. For spectacle, the first 'Allegretto' piece was hard to beat, with a row of brass instruments up in the choir balcony blasting out a fanfare to us. This sounded almost proto-Laibach to me, for all that the Slovenian sensations are maybe more associated with percussion than wind. The brass sat out the second movement, which to me seemed almost like proto-minimalism - there were parts of it that could easily have been passed off as work by Philip Glass or Steve Reich. The fourth movement actually sounded familiar - it relied heavily on the brass again, though not as relentlessly as the first movement, and after racking my brains I worked out where I heard it before - when I was a little lad, it used to be the theme music for Crown Court, the TV programme where scripted court cases were acted out before an actual jury taken from the general public. And then at the very end, the mass brass attack was back and everyone played at once, very exciting.

Janácek is someone I often think of engaging more with. I have a great CD of some string quartet music he did, acquired as a souvenir on a trip to Prague. But when I more recently acquired a recording of his Glagolithic Mass I had to conclude that it was a bit boring and I gave it away. This Sinfonietta, though, it was all that.

And then to the reason why we had come along - a performance of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. This piece of popular schlock appealed to us because of its connections with our reading War & Peace a chapter a day in this 200th anniversary year of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Sadly this was not one of those productions were the orchestra dress up as members of the Imperial Guard, the conductor is Napoleon, and they have actual cannons blasting out when things get a bit rorty snorty towards the end, but it was still all very exciting. I gather that Tchaikovsky himself hated the Overture and the notes give the impression that it is not really held in that high regard by advanced lovers of music, but the audience lapped it up and I think even the musicians enjoyed playing it. Top marks also to conductor Alan Buribayev.

In real "ME AM BRANE" action, I would also like to mention the pianist Finghin Collins, who was very memorable, except that I cannot remember which of the four pieces he played on. I should take better notes.

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