You’re playing, say, a Brahms sonata. You’ve got jam on your face. Your trousers fall down. Your accompanist starts to play the piano with his head. What you’re meant to do in this situation, I remember my violin teacher drilling into me, is to drive on blindly. Judging last night’s concert by this basic lesson on musicianship, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra, who drove on through a complete blackout during the penultimate tableau of The Firebird, triumphed.
Ok, so the darkness lasted only two seconds. And it’s lucky it hit when it did. A few bars later - in the shifting sands of the finale - and it would have surely been curtains. But still to be pitched into night at this delicate musical point – a real fulcrum in the work - and for the conductor to come out the other end unscathed was pretty damn impressive – the orchestra gave him a special big hand at the end for his extraordinary efforts. And this was, I assure you, a total, total eclipse. Every small, medium, large, reserve, emergency, filter, trendy, colour and even standard clip-on light had failed them.
The lighting was obviously meant to do something clever theatrically at the moment at which it cut out. It’s surely too much of a coincidence that the failure came at a point in the plot that verbally indicates a period of “profound darkness” and that an earlier near-failure sunk the final flourish of the lecherous villain, Kashchei, into a perfectly villainous gloom.
The lights were being fiddled with, certainly. Standard bulbs had been added to with coloured and patterned filters for theatrical effect. Presumably this was one of the Philharmonia’s exceptionally cunning plans to attract the youth of today to classical music, having no doubt realised that the disillusion and violence out there among British teenagers - the binge-drinking, the depression, the knifings - of course all stem from a common rage at the flat lighting at classical concerts.
But enough about lighting. On to the music, via some politics. Janacek’s Sinfonietta began the concert. The context of this work’s birth is a reminder of how widespread the athlete-warrior ideology that came to be so associated with the Hitler Youth and the Nazi regime was in Europe in the 1920s. Britain had its back-to-basics enthusiasts - one leading member was Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Nazi-sympathising father - as did, of course, Italy and France, among many others. Some of these movements dissipated into hippie banality, others turned nasty. One, the Czech variant, Sokol, a national sports movement, has probably the finest legacy: a musical masterpiece, the Sinfonietta, which was commissioned by them from Janacek in 1926.
The work behaves in the way that the best meals do, offering an array of bright ideas in quantities that leaves you hankering desperately for more. Salonen revelled in the work, colouring in Janacek’s fauvist musical pictures with speed and spunk. The Firebird was no different. Salonen seemed particularly fascinated in the string colours: the col legno spiccato, the aleatory explorations and the muted runs. And as if the work needed any more drama, Salonen also decided to break the fourth wall, placing a trumpeter in our midst, and turning twice, rather excitingly, with his furiously red face to conduct at us.
What a shame then that all the compositions couldn’t quite match the quality of all the playing. Magnus Lindberg’s new work, GRAFFITI, was the lame duck. Its two parts – a stylish, tonal score that was as elegiac as it was self-consciously profound and a libretto made up of, by turns, poignant, dirty and banal scraps of Roman graffiti from Pompeii – sat on top of each other like oil and water. And no matter how beautifully the orchestra and the choir delivered the piece, my response couldn’t get past a stage of stuck bafflement.
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