The programme was Malcolm Arnold’s Piano Trio (1956), a Piazzolla selection of two movements from his ‘Four Seasons in Buenos Aires’ and Smetana’s Piano Trio. Another Arnold work, which made me think a bit more about this man’s music……. I remember Arnold conducting at the Proms when I was a teenager – a rather sweaty overweight figure in his 50’s. This must have been before 1978 when he was treated as an in-patient for several months in the acute psychiatric ward at the Royal Free Hospital, suffering from depression and alcoholism. The problem seems to be that while the poor man had more than his fair share of demons – he tried to kill his wife shortly before admission into hospital – this doesn’t always seem to come through into his music in any creative way and it can, then, remain relentlessly facile and never give a full sense of any depth of emotion behind the swirl of notes. Obviously, music cannot describe in the way a novel can exactly what that depth of emotion might be occasioned by, but it can describe more powerfully than words ever could what that emotion feels like, and it can also convey conflicting emotions much more clearly and powerfully than words can. When you compare the Arnold Trio with Smetana’s (written – see a previous blog – after the death of two daughters) you can sense how Smetana can make you understand and feel how he is feeling, whereas the Arnold work remains opaque, at least to me. However, I don’t know that much of Arnold’s work, I have to say, and I have been genuinely surprised and pleased to get to know the 5th Symphony – in which Arnold seems a bit like an English Shostakovitch.
The Piazzolla pieces highlight another inadequacy of the Arnold work – in Piazzolla’s case, a sense of the unexpected, a feeling that you are never quite sure what is going to happen next, and which, within the ‘tango’ framework, seems to provide huge variety – the second of the pieces ended with a pastiche Baroque tune, for instance.
Again, my seat wasn’t brilliant for the sound- or sight for that matter – but Trio Rouge seemed to give a good account of all these works. An enjoyable concert!!
John's musical journey 