United Kingdom PROM 66 – Tchaikovsky/Ellington/Tyzik, Goodyear, Tchaikovsky: Stewart Goodyear (piano), Chineke! Orchestra / Andrew Grams (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London, 8.9.2024. (CK)
Tchaikovsky/Ellington/Tyzik – The Nutcracker Suite
Stewart Goodyear – Callaloo – Caribbean Suite for piano and orchestra
Tchaikovsky – Symphony No.6, Pathetique
There was a lot of warmth in the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday night. When Chineke! play in their usual home, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, they and their audience conspire to generate a party atmosphere: harder to do in the vast spaces of the Royal Albert Hall – even Chi-chi Nwanoku, the orchestra’s founder, beating heart and guiding spirit, sounded overawed in her brief address after the interval. She got a huge cheer nevertheless, and rightly so: not least for her personal warmth and her care for the musicians she works with.
Almost 20 years ago I witnessed a kind of Battle of the Bands in New York’s Avery Fisher Hall (long before its reincarnation as the David Geffen Hall): the New York Philharmonic played Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, and Wynton Marsalis’s Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra responded with Duke Ellington’s version – the bands alternating, a movement at a time. The NYPO edged it, largely because for them it was a home fixture: the LCJO must have felt agoraphobic in that big dead space.
For their BBC Prom opener, Chineke! came up with a compromise: in 1998 Jeff Tyzik apparently reorchestrated Ellington and Strayhorn’s arrangement as an orchestral suite, cutting the number of movements from nine to five (fitting comfortably on one side of an LP). So Tchaikovsky’s music has migrated from orchestra to jazz band, and back to orchestra again. This was the Proms premiere of Tyzik’s version.
I wasn’t sorry that only five numbers were played. It was entertaining enough, with tight brass and some lovely playing by the first trumpet; there was some nice woozy work from the saxophones and other winds in Sugar Rum Cherry, and Andrew Grams’s direction was unfailingly lively. Not his fault if the music didn’t generate much in the way of tension or excitement: it needed a smaller (and perhaps smokier) acoustic space. In this hall it sounded a curious hybrid: enjoyable, but 20 minutes was enough.
It made me wonder whether Stewart Goodyear’s Callaloo – which brought the house down when he performed it in the QEH with Chineke! in June last year – would survive being transplanted to the Proms: I need not have worried, though its impact here was quite different. Goodyear writes that ‘Callaloo is my soul food…a dish from the Caribbean composed of taro leaves, coconut milk and spices from different cultures deliciously blended together’: in human terms, a heady mix of people from different backgrounds and beliefs blending at a Trinidad carnival ‘to create an authentic urban flavour’. Urban the music certainly is, stylistically, says Goodyear, ‘a blend of Calypso and Lisztian pianism’.
He is a ferociously virtuoso pianist, and in the outer movements all one could do was listen, slack-jawed with astonishment, rather as I imagine Liszt’s audiences did: but it was the quieter middle movements that made the greater impression. Mento, in the style of a Jamaican folk song, was enchanting, blending low piano chords with strings and a quiet riff on stopped horns; Afterglow even more so, opening with lilting flutes over quiet bongos, the piano entering with starlit sounds that put me in mind of Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto. The piano strolls on, accompanied only by soft bongos, pausing for a quiet conversation with the violas. Magical.
Goodyear’s Cadenza, beginning reflectively and building tremendously, returned us to carnival noise and excitement in the concluding Soca, rimshots going off like rifles, peaking with bongos and timpani in an extended cadenza of their own. And so to the preposterous ending, a protracted argument between piano and orchestra over which of them should have the last word. The reception was exuberant: after several curtain-calls Goodyear stood at the keyboard and yelled ‘You guys want more sweat?’ Of course we did, and he tore into the Precipitato from Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata. Phenomenal, though something quieter would have been at least as good.
After the interval, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth: two nights after Mahler’s Sixth. A pointless juxtaposition (though they traverse similar emotional territory) other than to highlight Tchaikovsky’s economy of means: in addition to the strings – i.e. woodwind, brass, percussion – Tchaikovsky’s Sixth requires 22 players: Mahler’s requires at least 50. It comes as a surprise to realise that these two Sixths are separated by only ten years.
Economy of means – and also of expression: the best thing about this performance was its refusal to exaggerate or sentimentalise Tchaikovsky’s already powerfully expressive music. It must be tempting to pull it about, as Leonard Bernstein increasingly did (in his last recording, it took him almost an hour to wring every last drop out of it): but there was a concentrated seriousness and honesty about Grams’s interpretation and Chineke!’s playing that commanded attention from the crepuscular bassoon that opens the symphony to the fading heartbeats on cellos and basses that extinguish it.
The arrival of the great melody in the first movement was fragile, subdued, not – as Marina Frolova-Walker pointed out in her programme note – a genuine love theme, but a memorial to love lost: even in full, passionate dress it was no match for the forces ranged against it. There was lovely playing from the first clarinet, winding it down to rest before the development crashes in; the music’s ruinous collapse back into darkness was as dramatic as anything in Mahler’s Sixth. After the reappearance of the melody the clarinet tugged at our hearts again, and the sad, compassionate chorale that seems to intone some kind of benediction over human suffering and striving ended the movement in provisional calm.
The suave, fleet-footed, waltz-like 5/4 of the Allegro con grazia brought relief, but nothing more: Grams was very attentive to the echoes of pain in the drooping, minor-key phrases at its heart. The third movement’s march was thrillingly dispatched (an emphatic bass drum), but with the clenched, slightly frenetic quality that robs it of simple triumph. Under Grams’s direction the strings achieved a pitch of eloquence in the finale that was very affecting; a couple of horn wobbles apart, the playing throughout the performance was very fine, with particularly lovely work from the woodwind principals.
Rarely can an orchestra have been asked to perform a programme whose two halves were further apart than here. Chineke! is nothing if not versatile, and although Ellington and Goodyear are closer to its home turf, it was Tchaikovsky who counted in the end.
Chris Kettle
Featured Image: Andrew Grams and the Chineke! Orchestra BBC/Andy Paradise
