Page 184 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

The Albert Hall had emptied slightly for the second half of the concert – perhaps
suggesting the wisdom of placing new works in the second half is not always a
good idea. If we had already had a piano concerto, then Gabriela Ortiz’s Clara is
a work about a pianist – Clara Schumann and her husband, the composer Robert
Schumann. Ortiz has largely based the work on the complex relationship and
personalities between the two – this was a relationship at least as important
historically as the one of Percy Bysshe Shelly and Mary Wollstonecraft, albeit
with some of the feminist ideals of the time more heavily weighted towards the
latter – but has set their intimate past in the present where conversations are
with the composer, Ortiz, herself. The five sections of the work are a kind of
thread with the oboe as the instrument defining Clara; but the music also

attempts to bring them both into the modern world where they can have a
different kind of conversation. Ortiz has in one way written a work of gender
rebellion – a piece that answers Clara’s question of whether a woman can, or
should, ever be a composer and whether she should be the first one to ever
attempt to be the one to break that historic barrier.

Ortiz’s Clara is her attempt to acknowledge the difficulty women face in music
– in all aspects of it – and to confront head on a response to it. There is certainly
nothing quietly ‘feminine’ about her music here – despite the leitmotif that runs
through the music. There is a kind of Bernstein-like excitement to the score early
on, an energy and fizz to it that has inexorable pace. But it also touches on the
acerbic – with chilling woodwind and ghostly percussion (the magical use of
cymbals); it is almost oriental in some places. It can sound Second Viennese,
uncomfortable, a little jarring sometimes. High strings and the punctuated
singing of a xylophone lead into Clara’s final theme.

The RLPO played it with superb concentration and skill. Instrumental solos –
especially from the oboe – were superb, done with a genuine sense of character.
Despite the convincing performance, however, I wasn’t entirely persuaded by
the work’s narrative – but there’s no question the music is impressively
composed.

The final work on the program was Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances
from West Side Story. In 1957, when the work first opened on Broadway, critics
rather disliked it – the New York Times, so often a newspaper to get things
wrong, said it ‘had no tunes’. That was rather wide of the mark then and
remains so today – although it was an outlier work at the time much as some of
the early Marlon Brando films were.

Perhaps Bernstein was trying to mirror Rachmaninoff (a composer he never
really had much time for) in calling his arrangement, made in 1960, ‘Symphonic