Thursday, February 6, 2014
Panufnik centenary concert, LSO, Barbican, review
When the composer Andrzej Panufnik defected in 1954, he went, as he memorably put it, "from my Polish position of No 1 to No One at All in England". But his fortunes changed, thanks not least to the London Symphony Orchestra, with which he forged the closest orchestral relationship of his career. Fittingly, the LSO was in charge of officially launching this year's Panufnik centenary celebrations.
It did so impressively, with one of Panufnik's most popular and public works: the Sinfonia Sacra, written in honour of his homeland yet with a freedom of expression he would not have enjoyed there at the time. The year 1966 was an important one in Poland, marking the millennium of Christianity there – hence this symphony's title and its use of the ancient hymn Bogurodzica ("Mother of God").
The work's structure, laid out clearly in this performance under the conductor Michael Francis, balances three shorter "Vision" movements with a final "Hymn". Opening with antiphonal fanfares from four scattered trumpets, the music tumbles out before giving way to still, chant-like writing for strings alone. This is blown away by biting and sometimes violent outbursts – played with bracing virtuosity – that are hard not to hear as some sort of protest against Poland's communist regime.
Disembodied phrases in high string harmonics open the finale and are gathered up hauntingly in a soundworld that is all Panufnik's. Poised somewhere between a prayer and a lullaby, it also anticipates such Górecki pieces as the famous Third Symphony. Building the movement up steadily, Francis unleashed the trumpets again to luminous effect, before the Bogurodzica tune was finally heard in full, organ-like in the way it thundered out.
The start of this movement has echoes, too, of Panufnik's seminal Lullaby, the short 1947 work in which he explored quarter-tones and unfamiliar modalities. But Francis's conducting here missed the ethereal quality so essential to this remarkable music, or at least he failed to get the reduced group of 29 players to feel its spell: their playing sounded detailed rather than hazy, and the overall effect was not hushed enough.
Crowd-pulling Dvořák completed the concert. Francis stressed the banalities of the Ninth Symphony, and could do little to counter Anne-Sophie Mutter's hard-toned traversal of the Violin Concerto. Granted, traffic chaos had delayed her arrival at the Barbican and forced a reordering of the programme, but this was an unsatisfyingly tense performance.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/36cc4a8a/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Cmusic0Cclassicalconcertreviews0C10A6226450CPanufnik0Ecentenary0Econcert0ELSO0EBarbican0Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
