Ulster Hall, Belfast
Schubert
– Symphony No 5.
Clara Schumann– Piano Concerto.
It may seem odd to say it, but a lot was lost with the opening of the National Concert Hall back in 1981. Before that time, the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra, as it then was, presented itself as a broadcasting orchestra, with all that implies in terms of exploring unusual repertoire, new and old, often in the context of free studio-invitation concerts.
The Ulster Orchestra, whose major funders are the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the BBC, spends part of its time working specifically to broadcasting remits, with programming firmly in the hands of BBC producers, who create programmes to enrich the schedules of BBC Radio 3.
The current series of free BBC invitation concerts is providing a focus on music by women. The concerts will include the premiere of the 1933 Violin Concerto by little-known Irish composer Ina Boyle (1889-1967), a number of pieces by other Irish composers, and a work by the Victorian symphonist, Alice Mary Smith.
The opening lunchtime concert, at the Ulster Hall this week, included a performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, not the famous one by Robert Schumann but a much earlier one by Clara Schumann, or Clara Wieck as she was at the time of composition.
Clara was just 13 when she started work on the concerto in 1833, and was already known to a wide public as one of the major virtuosos of the day. Robert, her senior by nine years, was on the scene by then, and had a hand in the orchestration of the concerto, which was premiered in 1837 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, with Mendelssohn conducting.
The soloist at the Ulster Hall was Chinese pianist Sa Chen, who dug into the opening flourishes to produce a thunder of octaves that you might expect from a concerto of the later 19th century. It was a gesture that served to assert the individuality of both the composer and the performer.
The concerto is a strangely balanced piece. The sometimes Chopin-esque virtuoso passagework of the opening movement is followed by a straightforwardly sentimental Romance with solo cello (with wonderful colours and a startling narrowing of focus), while the brilliant finale which follows is as long as the two earlier movements together. Sa Chen’s hard-toned brilliance often threatened to press the music beyond breaking point, but never actually did. With Howard Shelley an able partner on the podium, this made for a genuinely exciting performance, and the work only flagged in the finale, which did seem to go on rather too long.
The concert opened with a safely middle-of-the-road account of another work by a celebrated teenager, Schubert’s sunny Fifth Symphony, completed in 1816 at the age of 19.
