Bach Mendelssohn Festival, Part I, Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra review - the flame that never died

“I am not better than my fathers.” Cracked, pained, occasionally rasping, rising to a fearsome roar then subsiding to a throaty whisper, Sir Bryn Terfel’s still-formidable bass-baritone made the great vault of Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford shrink to a shoebox.

With all the vocal charisma of old, and lashings of unashamed theatricality, Terfel (pictured below by Mitch Jenkins) delivered the great despairing lament, “It is enough”, that most obviously acknowledges the debt Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah owes to the Passions of JS Bach. 

Mendelssohn’s outcast prophet pleads for the unfathomable God of Abraham to “take away my life” as his efforts to turn the people from the idolatrous worship of Baal seem to fail. Only at the close of the epic testament that Mendelssohn premiered to an enraptured Birmingham Town Hall in 1846 does the Lord’s “still small voice” bring solace. Do we fall short of our forefathers, and foremothers? The Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra’s festival weekend of concerts and talks devoted to Bach and Mendelssohn managed to pose Elijah’s angst-ridden question in a wholly enjoyable and instructive way. In between three performances at the Sheldonian – the culmination of the first tranche of the OPO’s ambitious Bach-Mendelssohn project, which continues next February and March – came a day of discussions at Magdalen College dedicated to the composers’ connections across time and in their wider cultural landscape. During his presentation, Benedict Taylor – professor of music at Edinburgh University – made the key point that Mendelssohn himself didn’t suffer from any Elijah-like inferiority complex towards the Bach he venerated. For him, a relaxed “respect for greatness” in past composers mattered more than any agonistic striving to overthrow and surpass them. At a cultural moment when the “anxiety of influence” can result in full-scale artistic parricide, Mendelssohn’s attitude of practical homage, rather than cowed ancestor-worship, may be helpful right now. 

Elijah, which rounded off the programme, still felt like a splendidly gaudy and overwrought Victorian folly next to (say) the intimacy and inwardness of the St Matthew Passion that the young Mendelssohn so famously revived at the Berlin Singakademie in 1829. No matter: it was still a joy to hear a thrillingly committed full-cream performance from the OPO, the Crouch End Festival Chorus, and a quartet of stellar soloists, our ears freshly attuned to its Bachian provenance. Not just Bach: Handel, even Mozart, audibly figure among its forebears – even, in gorgeous interludes such as the tenor’s “Ye shall ever surely find me”, the bel canto masters. Call it Victorian kitsch if you like (as scoffers from Bernard Shaw onwards have). Still, in a reading as robust, open-hearted and well-integrated as veteran choral conductor John Lubbock gave Elijah, kitsch has seldom sounded so seductive. 

Besides, the majesty or delicacy of many of its arias, recitatives and choruses easily outweigh the periodic bouts of melodramatic – almost music-hall – Biblical bombast. Elijah’s revival of the widow’s seemingly dead son gave both Terfel and Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, the lustrous and commanding soprano soloist (pictured below by Vera Elma Vacek), a platform for the sort of vocal and emotional intensity that brought top-flight opera-house glamour to a rainy night in Oxford. Indeed, several scenes – another was mezzo Angharad Lyddon’s slinkily wicked turn as Jezebel as she tries to thwart Elijah – reminded us of how oratorio at this elevated level filled the opera-shaped hole of much Victorian, and post-Victorian, musical life in Britain. Tenor Trystan Llŷr-Griffiths’s Obadiah made a creamy and elegant foil to the no-holds-barred ferocity of Terfel’s rugged phrasing and delivery as the prophet. Terfel in scenery-chewing mode was not always pretty to hear, but hugely affecting, and in gentler moments – such as a ravishing farewell, “Thy kindness shall not depart from me” – channelled not his Covent Garden or Met voice but the Welsh hymn-singer who can silence, or rouse, a rugby stadium. That felt just right, for this work. Meanwhile, treble Belinda Gifford-Guy rose, cool and firm, to the occasion as the Child who proclaims the end of the drought that afflicts the people when she spies a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. 

Lubbock’s sweeping, emphatic gestures pushed the Crouch End singers – divided into four choirs around the gallery – into explosive fortissimos and spine-tingling pianissimos: a sound not simply massive when required but flexible and sensitive, from the the torrential jubilation of their “Thanks be to God” to the celestial magic of the angels' “Lift thine eyes to the mountains” that follows Elijah’s dark night of the soul. The OPO brass summoned all the wondrous almighty din the score demands but showed mellow refinement too, while the woods (especially flutes and clarinets) made their not-so-small voices always count. And the cellos sang warm, sweet and low – in “It is enough” above all.

Among the weekend’s pleasures was the Sheldonian acoustic: direct, immediate, bracingly clear for Bach but suitable too for voicing the classical lucidity behind Mendelssohn, even in his ultra-romantic moods. One OPO concert sandwiched his playful, Mozartian First Piano Concerto between the Hebrides Overture and the Third, “Scottish”, Symphony: twin monuments to the storm-tossed grandeur the composer had found in his beloved Highlands. 

The overture, conducted by Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey before OPO music director Marios Papadopoulos took over for the other works, transmitted the sparkle and glitter of sunlight on waves as well as a deep marine swell. The tight semicircle of players lent brightness and focus to the sound. Some of the instrumental desks for the Hebrides were occupied by students who sit beside OPO members in its “Side-by-side” scheme. They had the opportunity to play alongside the ensemble’s heavyweight regulars and guests including, for this weekend, Carmine Lauri and Tamás András as joint concertmasters. 

In the concerto, the young German-Uzbek pianist Nuron Mukumi (pictured below) brought a properly youthful freshness, even mischief, to the dash and dazzle of the allegro “con fuoco”. But it was the andante, with Mats Lidström and his smoky, burnished cello answering the piano’s legato lyricism, that hinted at the mature Mendelssohn waiting in the wings. Mukumi frolicked and gyrated delightfully through the presto finale, as Papadopoulos kept band and soloist crisply together. For an encore, Mukumi played a couple of York Bowen’s 24 Preludes: ear-delighting, not-quite-schmaltzy, Rachmaninov-era miniatures of the kind that Mendelssohn would surely have saluted.  As for the picturesque turbulence of the "Scottish" Symphony, Papadopoulos dialled down the wild weather so that dense orchestral craft shone through the Highland mist. Strings swirled and swayed through long, expansive phrases as we heard all the harmonic threads gather into a dense, almost Brahmsian weave. The OPO gave a sophisticated spin to Mendelssohn’s overt nods to folk tunes, notably in the relentless pulse of the bagpipe-inspired dance of the scherzo. They found plenty of horn-heavy dramatic heft in the finale as it broods, muses and wanders. Plaintive, refined cellos and woods transported us a little further towards Vienna than Inverness, before we got back with the Caledonian programme in the burly, strident battle-anthem at the close. 

Even with this brand of full-strength romanticism, Mendelssohn never quite loses sight of his musical forerunners. An all-Bach concert from the Academy of Ancient Music and Oxford Philharmonic Choir, led by Laurence Cummings, let us hear the some of the primary sources that so richly nourished him. Bold and balanced in the antiphonal writing, warm and strong in unison, the 18 singers of the choir performed two of the motets – BWV 225 and 226 – that would later form a cornerstone of the 19th-century Bach revival. In between, Cummings and the AAM made the Third Orchestral Suite swing, bounce and stride, with (for instance) the “air on a G string” no laid-back meander but a purposeful walk along a lovely line. Again, the Sheldonian layout paid dividends, as Leo Duarte’s Baroque oboes on one side duelled deliciously with David Blackadder’s valveless trumpets on the other. The evening closed with Bach’s D major Magnificat: festive, always dramatic, briskly paced, the instrumental colours and textures of the 1730s fitting perfectly into the architecture of the 1680s. Collectively, the choir spanned Bach’s wide sonic and emotional palette with precision and panache, from the percussive attack of the opening words to the sinuous rolling wave of the (almost) final “Gloria”. 

Not every solo vocal contribution hit the same high mark but several sounded glorious, from the plangent dialogue of soprano and oboe in “Quia respexit” and the jaunty bass-and-cello chug of “Quia fecit” to the frankly – and beautifully – operatic duet of alto and tenor in “Et misericordia”. The deepest Bachian spell perhaps came with “Esurientes”: the twin flutes (Rachel Brown, Maria Filippova) wove melodic magic around the firm, sweet alto solo as Timothy Amherst’s bass accompaniment showed that a handful of Bach notes can speak volumes. 

That text tells of the hungry being filled with good things, and the rich sent empty away. We might have to wait awhile to witness the second promise fulfilled – but the OPO’s Bach-Mendelssohn summit certainly filled those hungry for musical enlightenment with a feast for ears and mind. We could listen to the gifts that Mendelssohn received from Bach, but also learn exactly how that legacy endured and took effect. During the study day, the eminent Bach scholar Christoff Wolff explained that the celebrated 1829 revival of the St Matthew Passion merely put a public seal on two unbroken generations of Bach admiration, much of it sustained by members of Mendelssohn’s own extended family. It turns out that, over decades, Bach’s good name lay largely in the safekeeping of a band of doughty Jewish ladies: patrons, performers, advocates. They included Mendelssohn’s grandmother Bella Salomon, who in 1824 gave him as a birthday present a Matthew Passion score (pictured above, which we inspected at the Bodleian Library amid a precious cache of Mendelssohn manuscripts) along with his gifted musical great-aunts, Sara Levy and Fanny Arnstein. Harpsichordist and salon hostess, Sara had been a favourite pupil of WF Bach, Sebastian's eldest son: the Bach-Mendelssohn bond runs directly through family and friendship. Prophets and patriarchs aside, Felix (and Fanny) had their gang of extraordinary foremothers to thank for lifelong Bachian inspiration. In Felix's case, it carried him all the way from dutiful childhood exercises right up to the ecstatic chorales of Elijah. 

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