Incidental music rarely features much in concert-hall programming these days, still less the entire suites of pieces written for a particular theatrical occasion. Robin Ticciati, in charge of this Chamber Orchestra of Europe evening, chose to intersperse three extracts from Beethoven’s music to Goethe’s play Egmont with a stand-alone piece by Jörg Widmann and a bleeding chunk, the Scène d’amour, from Berlioz’ dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette. At least this combination, all played attacca, was deemed important enough to fill the second half.
Yet the chance was lost to present the entire incidental music, made up of nine pieces plus the overture, which in Beethoven’s overall design sees its coda reprised at the end of proceedings as a “victory symphony”. It was one of a small number of miscalculations on the night, but which didn’t detract from the superlative quality of the playing.
Widmann’s Liebeslied, written for eight instrumentalists, is an off-cut from a much bigger work that takes its inspiration from Schiller, in which the Janus-like character of love as both a representation of paradise and a snake pit is depicted. That already makes the link to Goethe’s play tenuous, because in it Klärchen, a girl from humble origins, dies professing her undying love for the noble general Egmont. Widmann uses the string members of the complement percussively, the music swelling and contracting in Berg-like degrees of lyrical intensity, concentrations of anguish coming from woodwind and expressions of fury from three gongs.
Ticciati’s eye for orchestral colour and striking detail was a feature of the Berlioz extract, where the rasp of second violins and violas and the piquancy of the woodwind provided an immediate contrast with the more sombre qualities of the Beethoven entr’actes. This mixing and matching did not work for me, and made little theatrical or programmatic sense, but the concluding overture was a fireball of energy, full of sharply accented chords and convulsive pain from oboe and bassoons. In essence, this was raw, full-blooded and utterly defiant in its concluding statement of triumph over tyranny.
There was a very meaty first half in the form of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, the expansive 47-minute duration heightened by the three cadenzas selected by the soloist, Lisa Batiashvili. Schnittke’s first-movement cadenza has its detractors; I am not one of them. It always makes a refreshing change from the Kreisler, and by including a minor role for the timpanist it then links up very satisfyingly with the four repeated Ds with which this concerto begins. In the final cadenza, the accompanying first violins made to sound like a swarm of angry bees were more than a nod to the irascibility of this composer, and a reminder that this work, described by Joseph Joachim as “the greatest, the most uncompromising” of all 19th-century concertos, encompasses vast emotional territory.
Ticciati, who accompanied his soloist most judiciously throughout, was alive to the sinewy elements in the orchestral introduction, with martial touches from the natural trumpets and a glowing bassoon counterpoint later. He failed to persuade me, however, that a series of staccato strings at the start of the central Larghetto was an adequate preparation for the Elysian sentiments which the soloist then explores. Batiashvili was sweet, soulful and serene, the evenness of her bowing and the controlled intensity of expression among the distinctive qualities of her playing. How to make music out of scales is the challenge the composer sets his soloist in the first movement. Batiashvili knew exactly how to respond, with subtle shifts in colour making the enormously enlarged sense of space that defines this concerto seemingly infinite in its reach.
