Talk about a game of two halves! Why was Haydn's 101st Symphony, the Clock, on the programme for the RSNO's concert with Neeme Jarvi on Saturday night?
The question's rhetorical. We know why. It was a makeweight in a programme devoted to Wagner, and presumably Jarvi, pictured, wanted to do it. Poor old Haydn was outnumbered, outgunned and out of any stylistic context, not just in terms of the Wagner but at the hands of a symphony orchestra that, despite some nice touches in the third movement and the helter-skelter finale, was routine in its delivery of the music.
So, let's leave Haydn out of the reckoning. The Clock will live to tick another day. Saturday night was about Wagner's Ring, in its "Symphonic Adventure" format: a clever distillation of the four opera cycles into a one-hour, four-movement symphony.
As played by the RSNO with fervour and concentration, and with Jarvi at his most effortlessly spontaneous, the Ring Symphony has a huge impact. It's all there, from the subterranean music of the Rhine, the deafening descent into Nibelheim, the eruption of the Valkyries as a manic scherzo, the avian twitterings of Siegfried as a bucolic third movement, and, from the point of Siegfried's death, an inexorable ride into the immolation scene and the apocalyptic overflowing of the Rhine at the end.
In those last sections, Jarvi and the RSNO were off the leash, with stunning playing that absolutely gripped. And when the violins finally got a good tune in the coda, they played with an intensity that was incandescent. Wacky but wonderful.
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