United Kingdom Howell, Value, Tchaikovsky: Jeneba Kanneh-Mason (piano), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Vasily Petrenko (conductor). Royal Pageant Corridor, London, 25.6.2025. (CK)
Dorothy Howell – Lamia
Florence Value – Piano Concerto in One Motion
Tchaikovsky – Symphony No.4 in F minor
This live performance on the Royal Pageant Corridor, given by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra underneath their Chief Conductor and Music Director Vasily Petrenko, culminated in as thrilling a efficiency of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony as you might hope to listen to: a becoming finish to their London season. The RPO, individually and collectively, performed (as they so usually do) as in the event that they had been extensions of Petrenko’s arm.
The epic first motion was outstanding not just for the oceanic surge of the primary materials – performed with fireplace and large precision – however, equally, for the sense of extensive and desolate areas conjured in its quieter stretches by the woodwind principals and by the violins, fining down their tone till they sounded nearly wraithlike.
Within the second motion the lonely oboe tune was warmed into life by the cellos and later the violas; the major-key counter-theme mounted to a shining climax earlier than subsiding to the return of the oboe tune on violins, the solo woodwinds effervescent up and down behind it like tropical fish. It’s a motion filled with refined shifts of temper, none of them conclusive: it runs out of steam, mid-phrase, on the bassoon. As Tchaikovsky wrote, ‘One mourns the previous and has neither the braveness nor the need to start a brand new life’.
New life however seems, most unexpectedly, within the busy insect-activity of the pizzicato Scherzo, sounding barely surreal in’ needle-sharp precision of the RPO strings, and unmistakably comedic: an interlude, or has the symphony taken a brand new and stunning flip? On the centre of this temporary motion it’s the flip of the woodwinds to social gathering (gate-crashed by a wonderfully shrill and assertive piccolo); then a decent little sotto voce march for the brass earlier than the pizzicatos return. It’s a charming motion, beguilingly performed, and it someway prepares us for the whirlwind arrival of the Finale: Allegro con fuoco: which was dispatched with terrific brio by a seething platform-width of strings, with winds, brass and percussion on crackling type, all the best way again to the famously hyperactive cymbals. Whoops, cheers and a standing ovation.
Such was the joy of this efficiency that it blew away any lingering reminiscence of the music that had preceded it. But the primary half of the live performance was a heartening, if certified, success. Why heartening? Now that the doctrinaire Excessive Monks of Darmstadt and Donaueschingen (and the Glock period on the BBC Proms) are fading into historical past, it’s good that orchestras are discovering room of their live performance programmes for music that was ignored again then, together with music by girls composers – who’ve been ignored, interval.
That mentioned, Dorothy Howell’s Lamia is a chunk that has had its day: Sir Henry Wooden, no much less, championed it between the Wars, but it surely has nothing fascinating or memorable to say to us at the moment. It goals at a post-Romantic lushness someplace between Debussy and the Respighi of Fontane di Roma, however nothing actually sticks, other than a drooping three-note phrase: not sufficient.
Florence Value’s Piano Concerto in One Motion is a special matter. Value was doubly deprived (‘I’m a lady’, she wrote to Koussevitsky, ‘and I’ve some Negro blood in my veins’): however because of the marvellous Chineke! the final couple of years have introduced me alternatives to listen to her Third and Fourth Symphonies. I used to be wanting ahead to listening to the concerto.
In distinction to the total orchestral costume that Howell makes use of in Lamia, Value’s means are modest: single woodwind with a second clarinet; horns, trumpets and trombones in pairs. The music’s attractiveness stems partly from her Deep South heritage (she settled in Chicago, however she was from Little Rock) and partly from the works of her favorite European composer, Dvořák, with its wholesome outside air so usually tinged with nostalgia.
Pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason’s energetic persona put us within the temper earlier than she had performed a observe. The opening trumpet motif is pure Dvořák, and the piano cadenza that follows – Value reversing the same old first-movement apply – is completely European, however because the music proceeds it appears to work an enthralling alchemy: Southern feeling and Dvořákian lilt sound inseparable, one and the identical. Or so it appeared to me. Within the central Adagio the piano muses freely, accompanied at first by the oboe, in music of nice simplicity and sweetness.
In each the Third and Fourth Symphonies, Value entitled the third (scherzo) motion Juba: a playful and energetic dance introduced from West Africa to the American slave plantations. Danced at temporary occasions of vacation, it expresses an infectious feeling of liberation. The concluding Allegretto of the Piano Concerto can be modelled on the Juba; the piano half carefree and ragtime-like, the orchestra swinging alongside, the percussion pointing the rhythms. Irresistible. Kanneh-Mason’s spirited efficiency was applauded with nice enthusiasm, and he or she favoured us with an encore: the Precipitato from Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No.7, performed right here with thunderous power fairly than the hard-edged ferocity of Pollini’s well-known recording.
Chris Kettle
Featured Picture: Vasily Petrenko conducts the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
