With concert schedules planned years in advance, nobody could have predicted that our performance of the last act of Berlioz’s The Trojans would take place so soon after the death of Berlioz’s greatest champion, Sir Colin Davis. But… I am getting ahead of myself.
On Wednesday 22nd May, I joined my colleagues from the London Symphony Chorus for Valerie Gergiev’s 60th birthday gala concert at London’s Barbican Centre. As a chorus, our contribution to the concert was small – the final act of The Trojans contains little by way of choral singing so that we had had just two rehearsals before our first tutti in Walthamstow. (Perhaps making the journey to Walthamstow on a weekday evening was our greatest contribution). The programme as a whole, though, was the kind of glittering affair you would expect on such an occasion, with virtuoso piano followed by virtuoso violin and a scheduled finish time that was well past my weekday bedtime.
In the first half of the concert I took up the option of sitting on stage and was not disappointed. Unfamiliar with Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2, I decided to close my eyes and simply listen without any visual distraction. Alexander Toradze had a touch on the keys of the piano that, simply, delighted. I enjoyed the sense of playfulness in some moments and the extraordinary lightness of Toradze’s touch on the keys. When he finished, the audience’s response was an eruption of applause and appreciation. I would have been quite happy to go home at that point and to savour the experience just gone.
I would, though, have missed more virtuosic sparkle from Leonidas Kavakos on the violin. The programme – Paganini, Ravel and Sarasate – was a collection of pieces which might easily have been marked ‘unplayable’, so difficult were they to perform. Kavakos played them with the assurance of one who has practised for a lifetime, yet without show. If he had any sense of being there to thrill the audience it was through his musicianship and technical accomplishment rather than any showmanship on his part. I found myself imagining the boy who became the man – the classroom geek turned extraordinary muso.
The final act of The Trojans, in the concert’s second half, marks a change – from the delights of virtuoso performance to the great soul depths of Berlioz’s rendition of the story of Dido and Aeneas. There are hard acts to follow here. On disc, it was Dame Janet Baker who introduced me to the role of Dido, whilst as a singer, I have had the privilege and pleasure of singing under the baton of Sir Colin Davis. So soon after his death, it proves hard to come to this piece without some undercurrent of emotion – maybe resentment, certainly sorrow – that it is Gergiev and not Davis who, this evening, conducts this piece.
The differences begin in rehearsal as Gergiev gallops through the piece, barely stopping to give notes or to ensure that tricky sections are buttoned down. At one point he tells the orchestra that their playing needs to be extraordinary and, right now, is only ordinary and I find myself wondering if such an admonition has any hope at all of producing the effect he desires. This is not Colin – it’s just not Colin. There is neither the feel for the opera’s story nor the meticulous preparation nor the sense of fellowship and connection with orchestra and chorus. As one colleague puts it after the concert, Colin would act this piece – where it was playful his baton would become the instrument of flirtation, where there was tragedy, Colin would be the tragedy. Gergiev, by contrast, conducts at extraordinary speed so that it is a challenge to articulate the words and so that, indeed, the concert finishes well ahead of its scheduled time.
Even in the somewhat rough hands of Gergiev, Berlioz is Berlioz and I find myself immersed in the drama of Dido’s final journey. Ekaterina Semenchuk, in the role of Dido, has a magnificent alto voice throughout her range and sings both with assurance and with great depths which touch my soul. So striking is her singing that the remainder of the cast, whilst competent, is somewhat overshadowed. Nonetheless, it is Berlioz who is most in my heart, for who else could write so stirringly and with such depth?
As I write, I smile to myself… knowing that, in just a few weeks, I shall have my first reaudition with Simon Halsey, our Music Director since the middle of last year. There’s every possibility that this reaudition will mark the end – or at least the beginning of the end – of my tenure (already half a lifetime and more) as a member of the London Symphony Chorus. I hope it does not but if it does, I wonder if I shall look back and think, he wasn’t Colin and still, he wasn’t so very bad.