These are among the masterpieces of graphic art.In 1765 he painted a picture of a famous horse called Gimcrack winning a valuable race at Newmarket. Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, Jockey and a Stable-lad was painted for the horse’s owner, the second Viscount Bolingbroke. It squeezes two events impossibly together: the horse and jockey each appear twice, once winning the race and once being greeted by lad and trainer. He was born in Liverpool and he studied anatomy as a young man, living in an isolated farmhouse in Lincolnshire, cutting up and drawing dead horses. Anatomy was his first and his last preoccupation (he spent much time during the last years of his life preparing a treatise on the subject), and this marked Stubbs out from his contemporaries.
Seen through his eyes, jockeys, grooms and stable- lads seem engaged not in anything as mundane as work but in a form of votive ritual, at the centre of which always stands the horse, the object of reverence.Not a great deal is known about Stubbs but not much needs to be known since he said so much in his art. He made the rubbing-down house on Newmarket gallops look like a temple. Stubbs’s subject matter may seem small, but it is actually the largest subject of all: life, in its biological and moral essence.
One of Stubbs’s greatest gifts was his ability to make reality seem charged with the intensity of myth, to make the present seem as mysterious and as beautiful as the classical past In his hands, Newmarket Racecourse became a sacred place. They do not describe animals, or at least they do not only do that. But his true subjects were not always exactly what they seemed to be.
His greatest pictures, like the extraordinary, life-size painting of the racehorse Whistlejacket, or the masterpiece of his later years, Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, have a haunting, haunted, visionary quality entirely unique in 18th-century art. George Stubbs has been filed away as a sporting painter, but he was much greater than that confining, genteel description suggests. He remains a deceptive artist, because for the most part he was such an unassuming one. He was one of the quiet revolutionaries, a man who changed the world without the world even noticing. Stubbs painted the subjects that English patrons required English artists to paint He painted wives, selves and horses Above all he painted horses. Just a touch of humour was all that was lacking to complete its musical deportment.The evening’s other hero was the SWF oboist Alexander Ott, whose solo passages in the Brahms and in Schubert’s Andante were things of beauty. On the broader scale, orchestral sections remained apart in timbre, though each knew the others’ game plan – and their leader’s.
Perilously fast, Schubert’s opening melody returned triumphally to end the first movement in identical real-time tempo, revealing Gielen’s precise, analytical view of the form, though doing little to foster a sense of dramatic flexibility. That’s a risk you take with a cerebral conductor, but you know where you are – and so does he Those forthcoming CDs promise interesting times.. Tetzlaff could also relax and prove his worth in the sunlit uplands of the composer’s lyricism. No less here than in the Bach encore, his playing was superb. But the raw, al fresco sounds of the woodwind in the long preludial strophe of the concerto’s slow movement sounded like a naturist’s challenge to the blended mode of tone production – and it worked. But with Gielen and Tetzlaff so rarely at odds, there was never much chance for the playful, if necessary, belief that things might turn out otherwise.
As in the Schubert, horns and trumpets offered natural, authentic instruments – complete with some authentically natural fluffs. Hans von Bulow, Wagner’s cuckold, described the Brahms as a concerto against the violin. The violin wins in the end, of course, as in all good examples of the genre. Though the frequent impression was of someone doing little, the work had already been done in rehearsal That meant poor marks for spontaneity. But, as for style, this was the conductor’s immutable view of the piece in question, whatever the venue, whether concert hall or recording studio.His view, also, of the Brahms; for the unsmiling young German soloist Christian Tetzlaff was clearly a figure in Gielen’s high-minded mould. Conducting much of the Schubert by the phrase rather than the beat, he could let these dedicated followers off the leash because he knew they would unswervingly stay at heel. Light years away from the easy-listening school, Gielen’s artistry declines the charms of smooth orchestral blending and passing detail writ large for easy effect.