This was a magnificent
concert. One of those you felt genuinely
glad to have attended.
The first
half featured a single performer on a single instrument playing a single work;
Qin Li-Wei performing the Sonata for Solo Cello by Kodaly. I must have heard this performed live several
dozen times by cellists of all shapes and sizes, some famous, some
unknown. Despite that, it’s never been a
work for which I have developed any kind of affection, and I have never even bought
a recording of it. Qin’s performance not
only changed my whole opinion of the piece, but drew my attention to qualities
in it I had never imagined existed. The
hallmark of a great performance is to make the listener not only reassess a
work but to change the listener’s life in some way; and by those criteria, this
was a great performance.
Qin found
in Kodaly’s music a sense of longing, a sense of dreaming, a depth of passion
and emotional intensity, as well as a surprisingly strong feeling of space and
place which was more than just the obvious injections of folk-culture which you
find in almost all Kodaly’s music. He
took us on a journey which was so absorbing it came as a shock when it ended;
had we really all been sitting in that hall listening to him for over half an
hour? I marvelled at the technical feats
Qin so effortlessly pulled off, and I lapped up his tightly focused, infinitely
shaded tone. But more than anything else
I sat utterly absorbed in a world of profound musicality which effectively
re-defined for me what a good performance was all about.
The second
half featured two performers on two instruments but still just playing a single
work. Qin was joined by pianist Albert
Tiu in Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata.
If the
Kodaly is a work which has never previously struck a chord with me, the
Rachmaninov is its polar opposite. From
the moment I first heard it – George Isaacs and Martin Jones performing it at one
of the Monday evening Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre Chamber concerts in Cardiff
in 1973 – it has been one of my most treasured musical acquaintances. I have been to a performance whenever I have
seen one advertised and my personal record collection includes eight different
recordings (admittedly three sent for review and one given in part-payment of
my having written the CD booklet notes, but four deliberately bought with my
own money in order to deepen my personal relationship with a work I adore). It may not have been the first work by Rachmaninov
I ever heard, but it was undoubtedly the one which made me realise that he was both
a truly great composer and one with a unique ability to speak directly to me
through his music. One of my proudest
boasts is that I met a man who had met Rachmaninov! The Cello Sonata is like a deep and dear
friend, and it would take a greater performance than any I am ever likely to
hear to make me in any way fundamentally change my opinion.
So, since
Qin and Tiu had no chance of making me change my mind about the work or even
look at it from a different perspective, I was happy just to sit back and
luxuriate in their playing. Tiu is an instinctive
Rachmaninovian, but even he excelled himself here, showing profound understanding
of the almost orchestral detail in the piano part, and revealing such a depth
of empathy with Qin that this stood out as an exceptional example of true
chamber playing. For his part, Qin rode
the work’s emotional ebbs and flows with a kind of searing purposefulness which
had the heart racing and the skin tingling with the sheer intensity of
feeling. The second movement in
particular had a wonderfully incisive rhythmic impetus to it which was as thrilling
to me as any music can be, and if the ending of the first movement had not
quite come off as well as it might, the ending of the second was a brilliant piece
of coordinated musicianship; Rachmaninov’s
gloriously robust and throwaway endings are often the highlight of a great
performance. Towards the end of the
finale, I did tend to find Qin’s tight vibrato – more a strained wobble than a
full-blooded vibrato – inappropriate to the grandness of the music’s character,
but there was no question that the majestically celebratory ending was a
fabulously executed climax to a brilliant performance.
I was as enthusiastic
as anyone in my applause (well, not perhaps as enthusiastic as the legions of
admiring groupies who ululate and shriek whenever either Qin or Tiu, or both, appear
on stage) and was happy for them to come on and take as many curtain calls as
they wanted. But then, to misquote Frank
Sinatra, they went and spoiled it all by doing something stoopid like an
encore.
After any
performance I need to savour and digest what I have just heard. I need to reprocess the performance in my
mind to reaffirm my impressions and to relive some of the highs and lows I
experienced during that ephemeral thing we call a musical performance. After a great performance such as this, I
need to go home and take the performance with me in my head, often spending
much of the night going over little things which at the time, I hardly
noticed. In that way, like a good meal,
I feel I am fully digesting it at leisure and extracting every last gram of
goodness and benefit from it. An encore often
denies me that pleasure.
Of course
there are occasions where a performance has been so wonderful that nobody wants
it to end, and an encore is demanded.
This was certainly the case last night, and I had no immediate objection
when the two of them reappeared on stage with Tiu’s page-turner grasping a
large copy of music. (The page-turner
had decided after the Rachmaninov that she would take a bow as well as the
actual performers. Page-turners can make
or break a performance, as any pianist/organist will tell you, so it’s
absolutely right that they should be acknowledged by the audience – it just
looks really silly when they bow as if they were doing the playing themsleves.)
I did have an objection, however, when far from reinforcing the impact of the Rachmaninov
by playing something which would keep that atmosphere alive and prolong the moment
for us in the audience, they shattered it with a clumsy tango by
Piazzolla. Great admirer of Piazzolla’s
music as I am, there is a place and time for everything, and this was the wrong
place and the wrong time for a Piazzolla tango.
On top of that, the playing of this seemed pretty haphazard, and went on
for the best part of 10 minutes. It was
like a great meal in a fabulous Chinese restaurant ending with a sour Fortune
Cookie which then got stuck in the teeth and revisited the taste-buds for the
next few hours as tiny crumbs dislodged and were swallowed.
They
compounded this misjudgement by immediately coming back on stage complete with
page-turner (another bow after the Piazzolla) clutching yet another musical score. There had not even been time for the audience
to decide whether another encore was required – we were still trying to get to
grips with the violent gear-change from Rachmaninov to Piazzolla – yet one was
obviously going to be imposed on them regardless. I made a hasty exit in order to get home and
root out a recording of the Rachmaninov to see if I could salvage some memories
of the wonderful performance I had experienced earlier.
In the
early days of public performance, when audiences were allowed to show their
appreciation by applauding whenever they felt the performance deserved it,
performers knew what the audience did and did not like, and would happily play
the more appreciated items again (hence the word, encore, which quite literally means “again”). We have countless examples of a movement from
a symphony or sonata being repeated, sometimes several times, and even of
entire works being encored. The practice
of imposing a totally different piece of music on a programme as an “encore” only
came about when audiences started to stop showing their appreciation of
specific items in the programme itself.
The conceit of sitting in silence through a complete work, especially
one which has no connecting thread between the movements other than the
coincidence of tonality, has destroyed the value of the encore and undermined
the integrity of the performance.
A young
performer told me the other day that he did not like it when people “clapped at
the wrong time”, since it put him off.
How much more off-putting is it to have something wholly inappropriate tacked
on to the end of a carefully devised programme.
Yet, until audiences begin once again to respond genuinely to what they
hear when they hear it, performers will never know what the audience would really
like to hear encore (again).
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