More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
17 March
To be honest, I have no idea, from to-night's performance in the chapel of King's College, whether he had a conception - or how soloist Tom Poster's, if he had one, related to it.
Between the two of them, and with the necessary participation of Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra (tweely abbreviated to CUCO), they performed the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 83, by Johannes Brahms. I found the following evidence of Poster's and / or Cleobury's possible conception of it, as a work and as movements:
Allegro non troppo
The horns had been strong in Parry's I was glad, which was good, because they are crucial to the opening.
Then the movement proceeded as a struggle between grammar and syntax, in which, for example, Cleobury failed to demonstrate that 'I hit the ball' belongs in the same sentence as 'through the window' and 'by mistake'. Each, though enunciated, could have belonged in different sentences:
I hit the ball. Through the window, my father watched me. By mistake, I trod on the flower-bed.
Allegro appassionato
Here, what came to the fore was Poster's seeming lack of any sense that what Brahms wrote as the piano part needed to be phrased, and very carefully phrased at that. The playing was mostly technically very accurate, but there was nothing betraying that he had a notion of the structure behind the composition - so, just as a repeated group of just a few bars wanted for direction, I heard no overarching understanding of the movement in toto.
It would have been fine, I have to add, for him to have played as if his part were being spontaneously generated, but only if it had sounded as though he knew where the improvisation was going. This did have a fresh quality, but not one that inspired me with that confidence in him.
Andante
All that I can say is that, if the pace set is meant to be that of walking, then it felt more like a dawdling, painfully strung-out amble. Fine to try things with the tempo, but it needs to work - I was just glad that it was over, although more and more reminded of the slow movement of the second Tchaikovsky concerto
Allegretto grazioso
The individual parts were pretty much all right, but very foursquare. What was not 'OK' was where one shifted, morphed, changed into another, as they inevitably: I swear that it was almost as if they had been individually rehearsed as separate units and then, never performed continuously, been brought together in sequence and the transitions left to take care of themselves (which, not surprisingly, they didn't).
The Michael Nyman Band achieves abrupt switches from one mood to another by working at it. Only in the tricky switch-over from one time-signature to a very different one did Cleobury seem to have put CUCO through doing that. Once in a monumental* piano concerto like this one just isn't enough!
End-notes
* The word is used in a good sense, but it has a bad one, epitomized to-night, where (delibertely alluding to Eric Morecambe) just playing all of the right notes in the right order doesn't create 'a cathedral of sound' as beautiful as the venue.
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