You lose some you win some: Prom 54 at the RAH
Prom 54
Anna Lucia Richter, Iván Fischer and Budapest Festival Orchestra
Royal Albert Hall
Arena, £6
22 August 2018
BBC page
Programme
Enescu, Suite no. 1 – Prélude à l’unisson
Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Mahler, Symphony no. 4
Encore: Mozart, Laudate dominum from the Vespers
The Enescu is a quick cute curio and I guess a pretty good opener for this concert, though the moment the drums come in towards the end of the piece made me remember what a great thing polyphony is. The Festival Orchestra strings played their unison line with romantic loving plushness and probably made as good an account of this piece as you would wish, though as I say there isn’t a whole lot to it and if this was all there was of music that would be a sad thing.
The other two pieces on the programme, though – those I could live with in this hypothetical, preposterous isolation. Interestingly the BFO doesn’t seem to feel the same, rattling off an at-best pedestrian account of the Bartók and then knocking it out the park with the Mahler: both magnificent pieces, one jumbled and abused and the other elevated in hushed reverence.
That said, there was a certain amount of consistency across the two pieces. The main frustration I had with the Bartók was a seeming uncertainty around rhythm – of all pieces to have such an uncertainty – which perpetually marred the music like vaseline smudged across a camera lens. I couldn’t tell if this was the fault of the acoustic, the conductor, the players or the collective’s lack of familiarity with the music (surely that can’t be the issue) but the result was a hesitancy around the downbeats, a parting of ways in canonic material, a general feeling particularly acute in the middle movements of each player trying to do what everyone else was doing but only after they’d already done it.
There was a touch of the same rhythmic weakness in the Mahler but with consequences far less significant. Here I felt in the first two movements some of Fischer’s rubato had been imposed without complete buy-in from the orchestra, who performed them true to the letter but not the spirit of the gesture with a whiff of that same hesitancy from the Bartók. But this was a minor blemish against the timbral richness and variation provided for each motif and each repeat, coalescing with not a hint of uncertainty or second-guessing. And then the third movement made me bawl.
It’s unkind to say Anna Lucia Richter’s voice in the fourth movement was a bit of a vibekill after the air-stilling close of the third, especially as it’s such a matter of personal taste. I know some, I suppose Fischer included, want a childlike-innocence kind of sound here and this is what Richter gives. Personally her sound was a little too white and shallow for my taste, which would be for more of a silvery spin to pull the line together. The orchestra continued their magnificent work from the third movement and closed the piece leaving me still and sad and awed. The farewell Mozart snippet, with all instrumentalists singing to accompany a front-desk quartet, was an inspired conclusion.
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