Debussy, Mozart and Messiaen at St David’s Hall
The view from Tier 2 before the concert
After work (and a pint or two) on Friday evening I headed to St David’s Hall for a concert by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Jac van Steen. The concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 so you can listen to it on the iPlayer for a month.
Two of the four pieces on the programme were by Claude Debussy (abovel, to mark the centenary of his death which was 100 years ago today (on 25th March 1918).
The concert opened with Debussy’s Nocturnes and ended with La Mer , both works consisting of three movements for a large orchestra and showing the vivid chromaticism and lush orchestration that typifies so many of his compositions. The last movement of Nocturnes includes some wordless singing, which was performed beautifully by female singers from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
The second piece was Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat Major K. 595, with soloist Steven Osborne. This, Mozart’s last piano concerto, is a nice piece, well played by both pianist and (pared-down) orchestra but I felt it was a rather incongruous choice for this programme. It was probably chosen because it is in some sense a valedictory piece, but all it did for me in this concert was emphasize how much the harmonic vocabulary of music expanded between Mozart and Debussy, and left me feeling that the Mozart piece was rather trite in comparison.
After the wine break we heard a piece that was completely new to me, Les Offrandes Oubliées by Olivier Messiaen, a wonderfully expressive piece with wildly contrasting moods, clearly influenced by Debussy but with a distinctive voice all its own. Messiaen is one composer I definitely wish I knew more about.
After the superb La Mer which ended the published programme, something very unusual happened for a classical concert in the UK: there was an encore by the orchestra in the form of a dance by Debussy orchestrated by Maurice Ravel.
All in all, a very enjoyable evening and a fitting tribute to Claude Debussy, a composer who was both modernist and impressionist and whose influence on the development of music is incalculable.
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In the Dark 
March 25, 2018 at 4:03 pm
Mozart PC27 trite?? Words fail me!
March 26, 2018 at 12:16 pm
There is much less thematic invention in this work than is usual for Mozart. In fact there’s one little melodic figure that keeps coming back over and over again in a way I found quite tedious. I am of course a great admirer of Mozart, and there are some lovely passages in this piece, but I think this is him far from his best.
March 26, 2018 at 1:05 pm
Of Mozart’s later major-key piano concertos I reckon it as good as 21 and 23. It was not knowingly a valediction on his part. My favourite is 24 in C minor, a piece Beethoven reckoned he couldn’t match. If he did, it was in his 3rd or 4th. The Emperor is too loud.
March 26, 2018 at 1:15 pm
According to the programme notes, much of Concerto No. 27 was written as early as 1788, and not in Mozart’s last year as has been assumed by many on the basis that was when it was first performed.
March 26, 2018 at 12:16 pm
I reckon the golden era is roughly the 18th and 19th centuries. Too undeveloped before that, largely cacophanous after. Even if 20th century composers know things about composing that Mozart didn’t, it doesn’t follow that they use that knowledge well. Picasso had incredible technique but largely didn’t bother to use it in favour of drawings that could be done by kids after seeing a horror movie, and once said that it was important for an artist to get his public to accept the full truth of the artist’s lies. And once that has gone on for long enough, technique starts to go down the pan too.
March 26, 2018 at 12:34 pm
I don’t think there’s been a `Golden Age’ either in music or in the arts generally. Each age has its masterpieces and its dross. That’s as true for the modern age as it is for the baroque era.
It seems to me that the need to rebel against prevailing norms is one major spur for creativity. The music I like best is often that which is produced at a time of transition between forms, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like music that sits comfortably in the mainstream.
March 26, 2018 at 12:57 pm
I’m glad you included that caveat about your car, because maximum speed on the autobahn in good weather is 300 000 000 m/s.
Changing the subject slightly, I listened recently to the 1812 Overture done with a choir augmenting the orchestra. There is more than one such version but all are much more thrilling than the orchestral original. I also don’t know why Tchaikovsky was so sniffy about it, saying that it was written to a commission. So what? Painters never minded, and the desire for total autonomy hasn’t done the arts much good in the 20th century.
I have an interesting book which has collected the comments of composers on other, earlier, composers. It is called “Composers on Composers” ‘by’ John L. Holmes. It is organised such that each chapter is about what others composers have said about a particular composer. Holmes has also edited a volume of comments by conductors about composers.
March 26, 2018 at 12:59 pm
Well yes Peter, but I’d rather listen to the dross of the 18th century than the best of the later 20th.
March 26, 2018 at 3:05 pm
Was Beethoven rebelling? It sounds like it in his mature (and pre-‘late’) phase, against tyranny and people – but people seldom succeed in replacing it by anything better or different, insofar as the great majority of the population are concerned.
Kenneth Clark interprets Beethoven very well in the penultimate episode of his famous TV series “Civilisation”:
To save time, catch the opening to 6.30, and 15.10 to 34.57 (the material about Byron is implicitly relevant to Beethoven). The first time I saw this prgoramme on TV as an adult in the early 1990s, the sequence in which O Welche Lust from Fidelio was set to a background of revolutions of the people seeking freedom, had me in tears.
I am enjoying the new series that Clark’s has inspired, Civilisations, generalised to look at all civilisations through their art, not only Western European. Simon Schama presents 5 of the 9 episodes and is clearly the right man for the job. The trouble with it is that Clark’s series was actually a history, telling the tale of the West roughly chronologically through its visual arts, whereas the new series is simply about the visual arts across civilisations. As such, it very clearly lacks a spine upon which to hang its (generally very good) individual episodes.
March 28, 2018 at 3:18 pm
I must post that famous chorus some time, but I would say that Fidelio does illustrate my point that the most interesting art (to me) often comes in a period of transition. Fidelio definitely marks the transition from the Classical (Act 1) to the Romantic (Act 2). This is largely because Beethoven took a long time and several revisions to complete the Opera, but even so the transformation from Act 1 to Act 2 is really remarkable.
Incidentally, Fidelio was a commission from Emanuel Schikaneder who wrote the libretto of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
March 26, 2018 at 3:08 pm
Oops, I failed to delete the words “and people” while editing the preceding post!
March 30, 2018 at 4:42 pm
I took that episode of Clark (the 12th), and the 6th – about Luther and Shakespeare – to be the outstanding episodes of the thirteen.
I’ve just been reading biographies of the great English poets of the late 18th and early 19th century – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. (Not all are categorised as Romantic, although of course most are). What quickly struck me was how similar to the biographies of rock stars they are – best work fairly early in their career, excess, premature death: in sum, sex and drugs and… poetry.