CAMBRIDGE PHILHARMONIC AT WEST ROAD CONCERT HALL
Jenny Stafford superb soprano
Once in a lifetime. The thrilling twentieth century works performed tonight are seldom played at one ambitious uproarious concert. Heart-warming, sometimes deafening -The audience is still in recovery.
Herald Holler and Hallelujah by Wynton Marsalis was an unalloyed joy. We know Wynton for his trumpet playing and his New Orleans background – he is equally at home with jazz and classical music. But this composition given full force by the Cambridge Philharmonic captured the full sassy sense of the rhythms of America. In charge, the stylish Harry Sever ( a veteran of opera conducting everywhere ) clearly loved the piece. Among the field of fabulous Maestros and Maestras, he has an exceptional control of the ( frankly vast, probably 100 instrument) orchestra. The result was uplifting. .
Ready for the Rite of Spring? First performed in 1913 , Stravinsky had every reason to expect a success. After all his Ballet Russe was the most fashionable ensemble in Paris – and The Firebird and Petrushka had gone down a storm with the public. But not a storm like The Rite of Spring provoked.. The reaction was crazy. Audiences behaved with the kind of abandon the composer had never intended. He had invented a new kind of music with staccato time changes, complex rhythms to express the atavistic energy of ancient nature rites. Nicholas Roerich the celebrated designer had created costumes to match the themes of violence and vitality Rite of Spring conveys. Vaslav Nijinsky, premier dancer of Ballet Russe, choreographed it. But Rite of Spring was too alien for the time. Riots followed its career. The Press condemned it by and large and when Nijinsky left after a row with impresario Diaghilev ( his lover who had decided to marry) he took the choreography with him and the project collapsed. When it next surfaced it was three years later as an orchestral piece. Stravinsky was there. The work now recognized as the triumph of modernism it is.
Tonight, the Cambridge Philharmonic gave it a memorably brilliant outing, Leonard Bernstein has said it ‘shocks and overhwhelms us’ and this superb performance did both.
As if there wasn’t already a crowd of musicians on stage. Sergei Rachmaninov’s remarkable composition The Bells called for a chorus – this was one hundred strong ;each one elegantly presented, a chorus with nuance and delicacy. Each of the four Bell types have a different character. The Silver sleigh bells evoke happy childhood memories. Tenor Dominic Bevan began with a bright, energy and brought us the joy of childhood fun with his glorious expressive voice. Soprano Jenny Stafford sang the Wedding Bells with an effortlessly gorgeous voice, and the fourth singer bass Trevor Eliot Bowes, Bass brought us the Mournful iron bells with his superbly sonorous gravitas. But however gloomy ‘Mourning the word of doom, While those iron bells unfeeling’ Rachmaninov hoped to be, his music somehow ultimately said otherwise “While the giant bells are pealing, While the mighty bells are thrilling’ the climax of this extraordinary work, chorus in full soaring form, was wonderful ; a memory to live on in the heart an immersion in the art of musicianship.
