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Music at a Distance

Distance lends enchantment, they say. Certainly it does in tonight’s Prom, not just because the current pandemic allows us to hear an orchestra only digitally and from a great distance. Also because of the pandemic, the orchestra’s players have to be well separated, within an otherwise empty auditorium, and it is these conditions that Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra turn into advantages. We may be more aware now of spaces and distances within the orchestra: groups of strings in dialogue, trumpets blazing through from the back, the gentle plinks of the harp filling the air. And some of the music will open out the aural panorama further, as we hear groups sounding from different points within the Royal Albert Hall.

Mitsuko Uchida piano

It was Ludwig Rellstab, a poet favoured by Schubert, who first likened the opening movement of Beethoven’s C sharp minor Piano Sonata to the effect of moonlight on water. The analogy, being apt, stuck. Undulations in stillness are projected by arpeggios that resonate both with the bass and with the melody, so that the piano is filled with reverberating harmonics, producing an impression of luminosity. And the atmosphere remains chill and dark, thanks to the low dynamic level and the minor tonality.

Beethoven published his C sharp minor Piano Sonata, and another with it, under the heading ‘Sonata quasi una fantasia’, and György Kurtág was thinking of both works when he wrote a pair of his own under the same opus number, … quasi una fantasia … in 1987–8, and then a double concerto for piano and cello. Like the Gabrieli pieces we hear tonight, both involve multiple ensembles, … quasi una fantasia … being an exploded piano concerto that features players being disposed in several groups at various distances. Similarly, the musical material is in potent shreds.

Four movements proceed without a break. The first finds freshness in something elementary: slowly falling scales, shadowed and greeted only by untuned percussion until, right at the end, mouth organs creep in.

After this, ‘like a chaotic dream’, comes a fast movement, ‘menacing and mournful’. Now the dialogue between the piano and the surrounding ensembles is full and wild, but hushed. The music spins into wider and wider spaces, in threads of echoing melody and tremulations, then quietens down – to be followed by the implacable roar of the third movement, led by brass and timpani.

The finale, based on a short piece by the composer for string quartet, is again quiet and slow, like the first movement, and similarly based on simple figures: a touch of folk song, a descending scale.

Tonight’s second Gabrieli canzon, in the ninth tone, is again for three ensembles, and gloriously spirited in its echo effects.

Mitsuko Uchida piano

Daybreak is imagined in this piece by Thomas Adès written specifically for tonight’s Prom, specifically, that is, for an orchestra whose seating is less packed than usual.

Adès calls his Dawn a ‘chacony’, a composition based on a repeating bass pattern. Other terms for this kind of composition are ‘chaconne’ and ‘passacaglia’, but Adès has chosen the form used by his (distant) English predecessor Henry Purcell, and created a bass line as elemental as one of Purcell’s.

Beginning on middle C, the line steps mellifluously down and returns; it is a wheel revolving almost to the end, passed from harp to piano to gongs, where it settles. With only tiny exceptions, everything could be played on the white notes of the piano, but these white notes are coloured by melodies and conversations moving through the expanded space of the orchestra. The wheel turns slowly, steadily gaining force towards the final sunburst.

1  Preludio: Moderato
2  Scherzo: Presto misterioso
3  Romanza: Lento
4  Passacaglia: Moderato

Everyone is back on the platform for Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, which was first heard in this same hall during the 1943 Proms, conducted by the composer. For 30 years Vaughan Williams had been working on an opera on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but, despairing of ever completing it, he had now decided to put his thoughts and his musical ideas into a symphony – into pure music held in a state of glow. He eventually went back to the opera and completed it for a Covent Garden premiere in 1951, by which time some of the themes were already familiar from this symphony, notably the gentle horn call with which the work begins.

Out of this grows a string melody, harking back to former times, and hence the whole first movement, ‘Preludio’. The music darkens and quickens for its middle section, after which the horns restore light and balance, on the way to climax and rest.

We might associate the short, rhythmically unsettled Scherzo with the snares and delusions to which Bunyan’s pilgrim Christian is subjected. More certainly the slow movement brings the hero rest, for Vaughan Williams indicated as much in his manuscript. The music weaves in constant contemplation of its themes and their constituent motifs. Its winding-down is by way of a solo for the orchestra’s leader.

In being a passacaglia, the last movement resonates with Adès’s Dawn, which immediately preceded the symphony in tonight’s performance. Having brought his recurring theme to a culmination, Vaughan Williams begins introducing memories of his first movement, whose wave motion comes surging back to restore the original golden calm. This may also be sunset.

^{Programme notes © Paul Griffiths
A critic for over 30 years, including for ‘The Times’ and ‘The New Yorker’, Paul Griffiths is an authority on 20th- and 21st-century music. Among his books are studies of Boulez, Cage and Stravinsky, as well as ‘A Concise History of Western Music’ and ‘The New Penguin Dictionary of Music’. He also writes librettos and novels. In his most recent novel ‘Mr. Beethoven’, everything the composer says is drawn from his letters.}