Pärt poise: BBC SO plays music by Pärt, Skyllas and Rachmaninoff
Music by Pärt, Skyllas and Rachmaninoff
Robert Spano, Garrick Ohlsson and BBC Symphony Orchestra
Barbican Hall
Stalls L2, £12
29 January 2020
Barbican page
Programme
Pärt, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Dimitrios Skyllas, Kyrie Eleison
Rachmaninoff, Third Piano Concerto
My main reason for buying tickets to this concert was, can you believe it, to hear the Rachmaninoff – my husband has an amateur pianist’s love for that kind of thing and I thought it might make a nice mainstream treat. I also had a selfish motive: I had extravagantly enjoyed Garrick Ohlsson’s Scriabin recital at the Wigmore a few years ago, and thought this might both make him a reliable interpreter and offer an interesting contrast.
The Pärt was probably the most successful piece on the programme. I used to find it excessively pretty but now see in it a kind of distant, marble poise that is most attractive. Conductor Robert Spano drew a disciplined and quiet elegance from the orchestra that sealed the effect.
The Skyllas managed to be quite fun and pretty annoying at the same time. It’s loud and brazen, which is usually up my street, and there are some fun instrumental combinations that make entertainingly crazy sounds. But it also goes on a bit, not in an earnest way but in a smug, self-satisfied way. I’d had well and truly enough by the end and could only look around with some envy at my fellow audience members in their rapturous reception.
My husband tells me that the Rachmaninoff is ‘such a great piece’, but I don’t get it – sure, it has some great tunes, but I usually find I get lost and bored before the end. I guess I need to listen to it a few more hundred times to emulate the player’s zeal. What we could agree on was that it was not Ohlsson’s night: he rushed throughout, with what I hoped at the start was a pushy sense of danger but whose uniformity made it clearly an unintentional byproduct of – what? Nerves? It led to some uncomfortable junctures, always pulled back from the brink by Spano’s measured competence.
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