A SUPER PERFORMANCE OF DVORAK’S POPULAR CLASSIC
CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★
In 1973 long before he found fame as the director of ‘Alien’, ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Gladiator’ the young Ridley Scott directed a television commercial advertising Hovis bread. It showed a boy pushing a bicycle, its basket laden with loaves, up a steep cobbled village street to the sound of the Ashington Colliery brass band playing an evocatively nostalgic tune. In just 47 seconds it captured the heart of a sentimental nation and has been voted Britain’s favourite advert of all time. More pertinently it introduced millions of people to the Largo of Dvorak’s Symphony No.9 with an immortal and hummable melody which conjured up a “land of lost content”. Music graduates at specialist classical record stores – remember them?– were bemused by people wanting a record of “the Hovis theme”. Sales soared, Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony became a guaranteed crowd-pleaser and half a century later it still is – as the full-throated roar of approval at the end of a rousing performance from the CBSO testified. Kazuki Yamada’s supple and flexible rhythmic approach, the music never rigidly stapled to the bar lines, was a perfect fit for the symphony. The dark E minor opening growled and threatened, the CBSO’s cello and basses inky black, before the surge of energy into the Allegro molto. The Largo’s broad melody was slow and expansive, without sagging, and Rachael Pankhurst’s cor anglais solo defined the word “plaintive” to perfection. The third movement was truly vivace with Yamada’s incisive conducting urging on his players, then topped with a cracking climax as Dvorak lets the brass off their leash, an opportunity the CBSO players avidly seized.
In her programme notes the German violinist Suyoen Kim writes that, unlike the Beethoven and Mozart concertos, the Mendelssohn,“offers a lot of opportunity for the soloist to feel and interpret the music in whatever way they wish”. Which she duly did, in a performance that prioritized rapt inwardness, gentle sensuous beauty and a smiling joie de vivre. Mendelssohn wrote it for his friend Ferdinand David, the leader of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra of which Mendelssohn was conductor. Leaders are first among equals, team players not Paganini-style me-against-the-world egoists. Kim is herself leader of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin and her teamwork with the CBSO, the ebb and flow between soloist and orchestra, was palpable as in the hushed emergence of the cadenza. Her tone was gorgeous, sweet but not over-ripe, aided by her 1702 Stradivarius. I heard the young Maxim Vengerov play the concerto here thirty something years ago in a blazingly refulgent and urgent performance, the polar opposite of Kim’s. It’s a tribute to Mendelssohn’s genius that both approaches brought great pleasure.
The Brazilian composer Villa Lobos’s most famous work is his ‘Bachianas Brasileiras’ No.5 for soprano and eight cellos, which many operatic divas have performed. He composed eight others but they are seldom heard and Yamada chose No.9, for string orchestra composed in 1945, to open the concert. In two movements, Prélude and Fugue, he engagingly gives Bach, the king of counterpoint, a jazzy Latin American feel not unlike the later fusion experiments of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Jacques Loussier. No substitute for the real thing but with an easy-going charm and Yamada had the CBSO swinging.
Norman Stinchcombe