United Kingdom PROM 23 – Rachmaninov, Busoni: Benjamin Grosvenor (piano), London Philharmonic Orchestra / Edward Gardner (conductor). Royal Albert Corridor, London, 5.8.2024. (CK)
Rachmaninov – Symphonic Dances
Busoni – Piano Concerto
You wait years for a Bus(oni), then two come alongside without delay. Benjamin Grosvenor performed the Piano Concerto at this BBC Promenade: Kirill Gerstein is to carry out it on the Barbican within the autumn. Little doubt there will likely be different performances at numerous locations worldwide on this centenary yr of Busoni’s loss of life: a trigger for celebration.
The night’s conductor Edward Gardner wrote within the Proms Information that ‘it’s a chunk everybody ought to expertise not less than as soon as of their lifetime’: and it was in that spirit that almost all of us in a well-filled corridor had come alongside, a few of us having dusted off John Ogdon’s magisterial efficiency in our CD assortment and given it a pay attention (not less than that’s what I did).
A piano concerto so long as Mahler’s Fifth (and with as many actions)? With a full symphony-strength orchestra? And a male refrain? Clearly Busoni was going for broke right here – no fan of Wagner, he appears to have provide you with his personal model of a Gesamtkunstwerk. He’s such an interesting character: a keyboard Titan who synthesised Bach’s majesty and Liszt’s fireworks, an Italian who saved abreast of the upheavals in Austro-German music (he and Schoenberg loved a mutual respect), a formidable mental who (Alex Ross tells us) suggested his pupil Kurt Weill: ‘Don’t be afraid of banality’. Weill referred to as Busoni ‘the final Renaissance man’. But he has left us hardly any music that may match comfortably right into a live performance programme: the Berceuse elegiaque crops up sometimes (I bear in mind listening to the Busoni and Zemlinsky scholar Antony Beaumont conducting it in Cambridge whereas he was nonetheless an undergraduate).
Even the orchestral introduction might be the longest on file: the principle theme has an nearly Elgarian sense of the Aristocracy and spaciousness. After one of the best a part of 5 minutes the piano crashes in, thundering up and down the keyboard, on and on, as if this have been a Gerard Hoffnung Concerto to finish all Concertos. It’s magnificent: and for the remaining ten minutes of the motion Benjamin Grosvenor was nearly frequently in motion, in music of extraordinary vary and bravura. The following Pezzo giocoso is a whirling phantasmagoria, the orchestra insisting on a taut, galloping determine whereas the pianist does his personal scintillating, mercurial factor.
I think about that that is the primary piano concerto to characteristic a tambourine. Busoni’s use of percussion in a concerto will need to have appeared revolutionary: along with the timpanist there have been three percussionists, and in locations they have been saved busy. At a few climactic moments within the later actions Busoni even co-opts a percussion participant as second timpanist.
The kernel of the concerto is the central Pezzo serioso, a 20-minute motion which Busoni divides into three sections with an introduction. Though I’m no knowledgeable, I had a transparent sense of Busoni’s long-range considering: his lengthy paragraphs all the time appear to know the place they’re going. The music is at first mysterious and expectant: the piano has a theme which begins relatively like a muted, measured model of Widor’s Toccata. The second part brings a brand new urgency and a heroic, decisive phrase on the piano which involves dominate proceedings.
Because the altering moods of the music succeeded each other, two issues turned clear. The primary is that Busoni doesn’t require the piano to be within the highlight on a regular basis: there are sections the place it acts as accompanist to half or the entire orchestra, as if it has change into a component in a symphonic texture relatively than a definite persona. The second is that this piece inevitably poses issues of stability in a number of the louder passages: there have been occasions, particularly within the whirligig Tarantella, the place I may see relatively than hear Grosvenor’s extraordinary piano enjoying. Price remembering at this level that if this was one of many demanding Brahms piano concertos, it could be over by now: however Grosvenor appeared tirelessly good. The orchestra too was excellent: the favored music hilariously launched by pizzicato double basses on this motion was considered one of my highlights.
And so to the choral finale, setting spectacular strains hewn from the Danish dramatist Oehlenschlager’s Aladdin (which was to encourage Nielsen’s Aladdin music 15 years later). As ever, the corridor performed its half: put sixty-odd effective voices up within the Gallery, out of sight, and they’re certain to sound transcendent – nearly as if the angelic boys’ refrain in Parsifal has grown up and was a male voice choir. We have been spellbound, and Benjamin Grosvenor, out of the highlight, was eventually in a position to chill out his fingers, and his entire self, for the primary time since his entry an hour earlier than. He was there, after all, for the magnificently stirring coda, hammering away towards brass thrives, two timpanists, bass drum and a gong.
Onerous to be goal about such an event; partly due to its singularity. Dr Johnson famously remarked in pre-PC days that ‘A girl’s preaching is sort of a canine’s strolling on his hinder legs. It’s not carried out nicely; however you might be shocked to seek out it carried out in any respect.’ No particular pleading wanted right here – it was beautifully nicely carried out by pianist, conductor and orchestra: vital detachment got here a distant second to marvel and gratitude for listening to the work in a efficiency akin to this, no matter whether or not you view it as ‘monstrously overwritten’ (Alfred Brendel) or ‘terribly nicely written’ (Grosvenor himself). Would I like to listen to it once more? Sure: but when I don’t, I’ll rely myself lucky to have been current on this event.
After the mammoth concerto Grosvenor gave us an encore – an association of Bach’s Prelude in D minor by Alexander Ziloti – which in all probability helped to calm us all down.
Earlier than the interval, a piece by one other – and up to date – virtuoso pianist and composer: Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, in a stupendous efficiency from Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, one that may crown any live performance programme aside from this one. I’m sorry that right here it solely will get a footnote: it offered unchallengeable proof – if any have been wanted – that this conductor and orchestra are probably the most thrilling partnerships round. However this was Grosvenor’s evening.
Chris Kettle
