Prom: Also sprach Zarathustra 21 July (Susan Elkin reviews)
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: John Sorgards
Violin: Sueye Park
Royal Albert Hall
Many composers have successfully evoked the spirit of the sea in music: Mendelssohn, Vaughan-Williams, Debussy and Britten to name but four. Veteran American composer, Betsy Jolas has, in her Tales of the Summer Sea produced what is effectively musical maritime sound effects. Nonetheless it’s quite compelling although its fifteen minutes’ length is enough. Flamboyantly scored, it requires four percussionists two sets of timps, piano and celeste and it’s the percussion section which leads the opening. Although Tales of the Summer Sea dates from 1977 this was it’s UK premiere. And when you see that John Sorgards is counting repeat motifs by holding up his left hand and lowering his fingers one by one as a signal to players you get an inkling of how difficult something as unfamiliar and complex as this must have been to rehearse. The dramatic ending was impressive.
Sueye Park is an unshowy performer with flawless technique and her account of Sibelius’s beautiful violin concerto was delightful. She brought sweetness of tone and found real gentleness in the opening. The adagio came with lots of rich G string work with sustained notes and impeccable bow control. I loved her take on the syncopated rhythms in the Allegro – vigorous down bows – and the duet with the timp was sensitive. Meanwhole Sorgards coaxed some fine playing from the orchestra especially in the first movement as the strings rise to Sibelius’s trademark brass statements.
After the interval came the piece which gave this concert its name: Also sprach Zarathustra and I marvelled yet again at how Richard Strauss in 1896, at age 32, managed to be “modernist” but still write with glorious tonal melodiousness – Brahms meets Schoenberg?
The Royal Albert Hall is certainly the place for the famous opening statement. Sorgards made sure the whole building vibrated. And it’s a stroke of genius to send one of the percussionists to the top gallery for the twelve knells of the bell at the end.
Other highlights in this performance included the silky string playing and mysterious atmosphere achieved in Von den Hinterweltlern and leader Zoe Beyers’s playing of the extensive violin solos with plenty of feeling and colour. Overall this Also sprach Zarathustra came loaded with grandiloquence, drama and passion and you really didn’t need to know much about Nietzsche whose writing inspired it, to enjoy it.
It’s always a treat to hear the massive Royal Albert Hall organ working its colossal magic, on this occasion in the competent hands of Richard Gowers. And it was oddly rouching to see him turn round fully when he’d finished playing in order to watch and appreciate the rest of the piece. It felt like a rather touching endorsement.
