Le tombeau de Couperin - Ravel
Four Orchestral Pieces - Bartok
Notations IIV - Boulez
The Rite of Spring - Stravinsky
Inspired programming and secure playing made last Friday night's concert at the National Concert Hall an occasion to remember. It was a pleasure to see the Hall practically full for a programme which, in some respects, was a gamble. The National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Gerhard Markson played four 20th-century works, neatly arranged so that they led towards the complexities of Boulez's Notations I-IV. And a strong though sometimes hard-driven performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring made an apt conclusion.
All three works in the first half began life as piano pieces. Ravel's 1919 transcriptions of parts of Le tombeau de Couperin, originally written in 1916, were played in a delicately coloured, chamber-music style. For Bartok's Four Orchestral Pieces, composed for two pianos in 1912 and orchestrated nine years later, the NSO was at full strength. It was increased to over 120 players for Boulez's Notations I-IV.
These scintillating pieces originated in a set of 12 piano miniatures written in 1945, when the composer was 20. Each one lasts just a few seconds, and should be played as groups of four, ordered as the performer wished. In the late 1970s the composer reworked the first four for orchestra, and since then has done the same for the next four. However, that is the least remarkable aspect of the transformation. Using the original material, austere conciseness has been replaced by exotic sensuousness. The language has some of its ancestry in Debussy and Messiaen, and directness of gesture readily justifies the extreme demands on the players. The evidence of thorough preparation - and of commitment - was everywhere, and music which can easily degenerate into a jumble came across definitively.
