Two outstanding soloists in Mussorgsky and Khachaturian both give superb performances in concert to remember by the Slovak Philharmonic under Daniel Raiskin

 

One of the interesting things about regular concert going with a subscription is the visiting orchestra. Once in a while, a group from a country which is not on the usual map of music making in Western Europe is programmed to appear. Last night in ADDA, Alicante, for instance, we were privileged to hear the Slovak Philharmonic in a program of works that, for the most part, have not been performed frequently in Spain. What the Slovak Philharmonic did not bring, at least at first sight, was any music by a Slovak composer. On the bill were a Czech, two Russians and an Armenian, who during his lifetime would have perhaps preferred the label “Soviet”. And indeed alongside the Slovak Philharmonic was a Ukrainian conductor, Daniel Raiskin, a Croatian baritone, Marko Mimica, a Moldovan violinist, Alexandra Cununova, and Spanish chorus, so the experience was decidedly multi-national. We did hear Slovak music in the final encore, Slovakian Czardas in fact, and indeed some folk-inspired Moldavian music for solo violin. But amidst this apparently disparate evening what held this program together was the commitment of those involved to deliver fine music, and outstanding it proved to be.

We started with Dvořák’s Symphonic Variations Op78. This is Dvořák, it must be said, not at his most tuneful, but the compositional skill in constructing these largely quiet variations is immense. Variation form is often quite difficult for an audience to listen to, largely because by its nature it is episodic. The Slovak Philharmonic gave a superb performance which brought the piece together. I describe largely “quiet” music, but in the final fugue the composer goes to town on orchestral colours. It is a work worthy of exploration at length.

Then we heard Marko Mimica as baritone soloist in Shostakovich’s orchestral version of Mussorgky’s Songs and Dances of Death. Marko Mimica has a powerful but lyric baritone, and his voice is perfect for these songs where the soloist is very much to the fore. His dark tones penetrated every corner of the auditorium, even pianissimo, and his expression communicated meaning, despite the fact that the back projection of the words were unreadable for a good part of the audience.

The evening finished with the Polovtsian Dances of Borodin, a work, which always brings the house down, perhaps by virtue of the vibration created by the high volume of the sound that the composer demands. Again, the words sung by the chorus were generally unreadable on the back wall of the auditorium. The coordination between the chorus, the Coro Amici Musicae under the direction of Igor Tantos Sevillano, and the orchestra was superb.

Just after the interval, we heard Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto in the concert’s main work. The soloist was Alexandra Cununova, who played the piece with a prompt from the score, but no-one in the audience listening with closed eyes would have known. This is not the repertoire’s most played violin concerto, but on the evidence of this performance, it is a masterpiece and deserves a wider audience. The judgment is not offered without having listed to the work again after the concert.

Alexandra Cununova’s playing of the solo part was superb. The writing of the solo part was also superb. But what came across above all was the compositional skill of Aran Khachaturian. In this thirty-five-minute-concerto, there were regular orchestral tutti from a large ensemble which played at considerable volume, but every note of the solo part was audible, even to the fore. This is a concerto written by a master of orchestral writing.

The play of Alexandra Cununova was not only perfection: it went way beyond that. Despite the fact that she took prompts from a score, the playing seemed completely spontaneous and utterly committed. This was the kind of performance that will live forever in a concert-goer’s memory. It was a work in over fifty years of concert going that I have never heard performed before. I will seek it out in future and make sure to hear it again.

Alexandra Cununova finished with a piece by a Moldovan composer, inspired by folk music, and this work for solo violin complemented and contrasted perfectly with the rhythmic bravura of the concerto. What a performance!

Once upon a Time, I read the writing of Aldous Huxley with enthusiasm. I was a little younger then… More recently, I have tended to find his attitudes rather stuffy, and class-ridden, not embodying the fresh view of the world I once thought he held. Brave New World was not representative and, in my youth, I perhaps mis-read its intentions. A television adaptation of Eyeless In Gaza at the end of the 1960s prompted further exploration. Recently, I found The Art Of Seeing worth avoiding. So it was with mixed expectations that I started Mortal Coils, a work the author published in 1921

Its form is interesting. Aldous Huxley described its five separate sections as three short stories, a novelette and a play. In each of the pieces, there is a keen, if somewhat caricatured central character for whom some random event, some twist of fate provides an ironic punchline. For that reason, I will not review the stories in detail. What happens is crucial, and it tends to happen right at the end.

Throughout, Aldous Huxley seems to be mocking anyone who apparently takes him or herself, seriously. There is a keen eye for pretension, but, it has to be said, these tales of competition are won, more often than not, by the wily, not the showy.

The Gioconda Smile is the novelette. Miss Spence has the smile in question. She is thirtyish and a spinster. Mr. Hutton is a well-to-do friend with a hypochondriac wife, who needs to take her medicine.

Permutations Among The Nightingales is a play set in a hotel. Various society-type guests pirouette around themselves for attention. There is a lot of coming and going.

The Tillotson Banquet involves rather rich people with a decoration urge tracing a long-lost artist who has fallen on bad times. There might be a commission. In his nineties, and living in a basement among beetles, the old artist accepts the invitation to dine.

The Green Tunnels is it story about a group of visitors to Italy. They become obsessed with one another as well as with themselves. Both gestures and actions are mis-interpreted.

In Nuns At Luncheon, Huxley mocks the act of writing, itself, as a scribbler imagines how he might fictionalize a tale about a nun who falls from grace.

None of these has anything like a grand vision. These five pieces are like extended jokes with unexpected punch lines. They are stories, however, worth the telling, and certainly worth the reading.

Gregorio Nieto plays Saint-Saens Cello Concerto alongside Tchaikovsky in an ADDA concert that approaches perfection

I normally start my concert reviews by focusing on the programme, then the performance and then the personalities. This time I want to reverse the order and start with the performers, or at least one particular performer.

Josep Vicent is artistic director of the ADDA auditorium and the conductor of its orchestra. For many years, he has worked hard throughout the Valencian region to raise standards of playing and performance. First with the Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra and subsequently with ADDA, he has worked tirelessly to achieve perfection of programming and performance that the audiences in ADDA currently enjoy. The scale of his achievement in Alicante surely ranks alongside Rattle in Birmingham or Dudamel in Caracas. Now, the sense of anticipation felt collectively by ADDA audiences is tangible. Every concert is not merely an event, it is a guaranteed memory for life. After over fifty years of concert going, I look forward to the ADDA experience in a way that recent visits to world famous venues cannot match. Congratulations to Josep Vicent for having the vision, talent, and persistence to make it happen, for the achievement is primarily his, though the ADDA orchestra that you created still owns the playing!

Last night’s programme provides a perfect example of the quality we have come to take for granted. At first sight, there is nothing particularly special. A Tchaikovsky Symphony, Saint-Saens’s Cello Concerto No. 1, and then Tchaikovsky’s popular favourite, the Fantasy Overture, Romeo and Juliet.

Now this last piece is so widely played and known that it might be hard to say something new about it. Personally, I first heard this over sixty years ago and my enthusiasm for it is undiminished. To call it a masterpiece is to belittle it. The perfect blend of conflict, falling in love and tragedy of the story is beautifully drawn by its composer, who both understood the play and knew how to create music to convey meaning. The transitions in this piece are apparently seamless, but they happen suddenly enough to keep the audience surprised, as well as charmed, even if the work is familiar to them. No matter how many times one hears this piece, it works the same every time.

It does, however, need to be played properly and with commitment. As has happened so often with very well-known music, musicians and conductors often rely on familiarity for effect so the performance itself becomes perfunctory. This was not the case last night with the ADDA orchestra under Josep Vicent’s direction. Both and interpretation were perfect and in under twenty minutes, the whole of Shakespeare’s drama played out before us. More Tchaikovsky followed. More swans, we were told, as the orchestra offered an encore of music from Swan Lake. The reference to “more swans” came after Gregorio Nieto had chosen Saint-Saens’s The Swan for his own personal encore after the work that proceeded Romeo and Juliet.

The work in question was Saint-Saens’s First Cello Concerto and Gregorio Nieto’s playing of it was a virtuosic, vivid and utterly communicative. It was the kind of concerto where the soloist and orchestra engage in musical dialogue, without obvious cadenzas where the soloist plays alone. This assumes sufficient orchestral skill on behalf of the composer to facilitate that dialogue and sufficient skill on the part of the performers to remain aware of the required balance. This is therefore difficult music to perform and last night soloist alongside the virtuosic ADDA orchestra under Josep Vicent gave a faultless interpretation. The experience was memorable.

As was the opening work in the concert. Josep Vicent has championed Tchaikovsky’s symphonies over the years and has given multiple performances of the equally famous numbers four, five and six. But this was number two, the Little Russian. It is a symphony that is performed less than the famous three, but on this evidence, the Little Russian should be a concert hall standard. The enthusiasm encapsulated in the writing of the finale alone might render it a permanent favourite.

The symphony was a complete success: a success in terms of performance because the ADDA orchestra gave an exciting and perfect rendition of it, and it was a success of programming by Josep Vicent. The performance, and indeed the whole concert was utterly memorable, which in the end presented three pieces by Tchaikovsky alongside two by Saint-Saens. The concert was entitled Conexión Latina II, in recognition of the evening’s soloist being Venezuelan, but a more apt title could have been Esencia del Romanticismo, since the three works on the programme were all composed in the 1860s and 1870s, so our experience was concentrated on a very short period of musical history. What a masterpiece of programming! It was musically perfect.

 

Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti – an authentic experience

 

When writing a concert review when the pieces performed are as familiar as Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti, one concentrates inevitably on what might have been different this time around. In ADDA las night we heard a performance of this music which had authenticity as its main goal. The instrumentation, therefore, was exactly what JS Back had originally specified. The forces of the English Concert, thus, were small and the hall large.

The English Concert was founded by Trevor Pinnock in 1972 as part of a movement that in those days was quite new. This was the “original instrument” movement which sought to discover and recreate how early music had originally sounded. Over fifty years on, and The English Concert is still doing it’s laudable work. I personally am old enough to remember Stokowsi’s versions of Bach for full orchestra and the absolute revelation that in Harnoncourt’s 1967 recording of Monteverdi’s Vespers cornetti were used instead of trumpets. In the twenty-first century, we have perhaps come to expect instrumental authenticity in early music to such an extent that when, a few years ago, I attended a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at a Prom, a friend joked that it was on the original voices.

Last night in ADDA Alicante, we heard The English Concert under Kristian Bezuidenhout in the complete cycle of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti. The order in which they were played was itself interesting, being 1-6-2-3-5-4. This presumably allowed the brass players to put their feet up in the second half, or to do what brass players do when they are not on stage. It was probably born of a desire to keep the sonorities varied.

The playing was exquisite, despite the fact that the natural hunting horns in number one are notoriously hard to control. The trumpet playing in number two, however, was simply divine.

What was a little frustrating was the rearrangement of the stage between pieces. This seemed a little perfunctory at times but perhaps was essential. It was Johann Sebastian Bach who chose what instruments to use, after all.

A packed ADDA concert. hall received the concert very well, but it was quite a marathon. One is always astounded by the harmonic and rhythmic invention in this music.

As a final note on authenticity, I would personally go as far as to suggest that setting is important, as well as instrumentation. Johann Sebastian Bach would not have recognized a new concert hall seating over one thousand people as a venue for the performance of what is essentially chamber music, perhaps. And the final note on popularity: the Brandenburg Concerti had fallen into obscurity for over a century before being rediscovered in 1849, a hundred years after their composer’s death.

The White Peacock by DH Lawrence

It is said that Maurice Griffenhagen’s, painting, An Idyll, was the inspiration behind DH Lawrence’s novel, The White Peacock. In the painting, a pair of lovers share a passionate embrace, surrounded by a lusciously idealized garden, full of colour, growth and flowers. The pair of lovers, however, seem lost to the beauty that surrounds them, so driven are they by their shared need to fulfil their passion. The painting owes much to Pre-Raphaelitism, but though the colours are vivid, and there is a sense of timelessness about figures, but the outlines are blurred, perhaps impressionistically, indicating, perhaps that the surroundings are vulnerable to change and so too are these lovers within them.

The White Peacock is a novel of Edward England, published in 1910-11. The First World War is not yet even on the horizon, though in the first decade of the twentieth century, Britain’s industrial landscape was long-formed. and its political and social formation were already modern. Yet, throughout the green and pleasant land, rural employment, and country ways still dominated in many places, as Lawrence describes at length in relation to the novel’s setting, Nethermere, a small place in Nottinghamshire.

Cyril Beardsall narrates The White Peacock. He grows up in the English East Midlands. We know this is Nottinghamshire with occasional wanderings as far as Derbyshire, but we never really visit any city throughout the novel. Indeed, we are hardly ever visit the narrator, who regularly observes, describes, but rarely opines, and never pontificates. At times, the narrator almost seems to be living neutrally everyone else’s life in turn.

Like the painting that inspired it, the novel is full of flowers, trees, gardens, and woods. Lawrence’s descriptions of plants and verbiage are themselves vaguely Pre-Raphaelite in their detail and colour. We visit farmers, gamekeepers, several innkeepers and, at times, it seems we have to fight hard to get through the foliage in order to release the trapped rabbit.

And of course, central to the book’s plot are the relations between men and women, childhood friends who grew up together, exploring what the natural world might offer them. Lettie has two admirers, George and Leslie. They are as different as chalk and cheese, and then grow apart, live quite different lives. As they mature, the need to earn a living rears its head above the flowers and compromises have to be made. Marriages are struck. Lettie opts for Laslie, the moneyed option, and George marries Meg, who is at least homely. Children are born and lives diverge, socially, professionally and politically. Only destinations remain similar in their hopelessness.

Lawrence depicts lives where choices have to be made, but where these choices are often constrained by something other than passion. These characters, predominantly the men, seem to have difficulty accepting who they are. They seem to be pre-programmed for failure, and then cannot accept when they feel it. The women seem to be coyer, and, as ever in Lawrence, the suggestion is that they are essentially in control of their relations with men. But these relations, always through marriage, produce new people whose demands on their parents are unpredictable and change all associated lives.

Throughout, the flowers continue to bloom, and nature lives out its apparently inevitable seasonal cycle. But for the people of the small, rural place, the idyll lasts just moments, moments where individuals might forget who they are.

As to the identity or the thoughts of Cyril Beardsall, The White Peacock’s narrator, we know as much by the end as we did the start. We do know, however, that he has moved away from the midlands and now lives a very different kind of life. I wonder who it might be.

Claudio Constantini and Josep Vicent deliver surprises in music by Gershwin and Beethoven in ADDA, Alicante

 

Sometimes a conventional concert program springs surprises when, as an audience member, you least expect it. This evening’s main surprise was the soloist, Claudio Constantini, who is one of the very few “classical” musicians who has made his name across genres on two different instruments, the piano and the bandoneon. Peruvian by birth, but educated in Finland, the Netherlands and France, he has never lost his passion for Latin American music and indeed the popular forms of that music. Having been nominated in 2019 for a Latin Grammy for his playing of Gershwin, it was fitting that in this concert the first half was devoted to the American composer.

We began with the Cuban Overture whose rhythms seemed to infect the whole evening with energy. This is by no means a light introduction to a concert. From the beginning, it is a major piece that might be considered as a tone poem for orchestra. It features Cuban rhythms (it was originally titled Rumba), and Caribbean percussion instruments. Gershwin wanted these at the front of the orchestra, but last night in ADDA a compromise was struck, with percussion at the back of the stage but regularly featuring large, projected onto the back wall of the auditorium. The musical effect of the piece combined with the expert playing of the ADDA Orchestra we sheer delight.

Then we heard Claudio Constantini as soloist in Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue. Approaching a work such as this, which in many respects can present a parody of itself, can be problematic. For my personal taste, in the hands of classical musicians, there is often not enough risk taking. In the hands of popular interpreters, the music often comes second behind the performer’s ego. This particular performance, however, was memorable both because the harmonies and rhythms were properly stretched to excitement, but also because the playing was accurate and respected the score. Claudio Constantini’s playing of the solo part illustrated the fact that he has he has he has played it before. His dynamics and timing were exquisite.

Now usually, the ADDA audience demands an encore from a soloist. Often performers appear reluctant to offer one. Not so Claudio Constantini, who needed no repeated curtain calls to come back on the stage with a bandoneon. He played one of his own compositions with string accompaniment, a tango of sorts, a milonga perhaps, where the cadences often sounded like Piazzolla. Superb. Quiet. Very successful.

In part two we heard a performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, No. 6. But this was different from any other performance of Beethoven 6 that I personally have heard.

ADDA programmes often list the movements of a piece alongside their timings. Last night’s programme did list the movements but gave only the duration of the whole symphony. Josep Vicent clearly decided that this performance of the work would have no pauses at the movement breaks and so we heard forty minutes of music without a break. It worked beautifully and Beethoven’s vision of rural life did come across as a vast picture of both landscape and people’s place within it. This playing of the piece without a break was a real surprise, and it was truly memorable.

Gimenez’s The Marriage of Luis Alonso closed the evening, and Josep Vicent encouraged the audience to accompany by clapping.

L’enfance du Christ. Op 25 by Hector Berlioz: Mark Elder conducts the Valencia orchestra and chorus in Castello - a surprising understatement

 

Having just heard a performance of L’enfance du Christ. Op 25, I realize how little I know about the music of Hector Berlioz. His Symphonie Fantastique has figured on several programmes over the years. as has the Roman Carnival Overture. Apart from a recent performance of La Mort de Cléopâtre and Les Nuits d’été, that had been the extent of my concert exposure to the composer’s music. But over fifty years of concert going I have never been to a performance of the Trojans, or the Requiem, or, for that matter L’enfance du Christ.

Berlioz is often associated with grand gestures of orchestration. And grand gestures in general. At least that is the general impression. Not knowing L’enfance du Christ and having heard it only once or twice in recordings, I was therefore surprised to find just an orchestra of double woodwind, backed up by horns on three trombones for part one, but no trumpets. Even the chorus in part one was only male voices. In parts two and three, we did have a full chorus, but the brass disappeared completely from the stage, replaced by harpist. It was hardly the orchestral forces that one would expect from an over-the -top composer like Berlioz!

And, having now heard a complete performance of this work, I can state that in no uncertain terms it is an understated piece, very far from the overstatement that is expected from the composer. It does have a particularly striking and unusual passage in part three, but it is surprising in a doubly surprising way. More of that later…

The performers with the Orquestra de la Communidad Valenciana and Cor de la Generalitat Valeciana under Marc Elder, with soloists Laurence Kilsby, Kate Lindsey. Gordon Bintner, Willaim Thomas and Matthew Rose. The setting was the Auditori de Castelló de la Plana before an audience that received this rather quiet work with rapt attention. Musically, however, the work is not what a casual listener might expect, being remarkably subtle in its construction whist at the same time daring in his harmony.

There are passages that sound like they might have come straight from a Bach chorale side-by-side with music that audibly presages Debussy. Especially in the first part, I personally found the passages sung by Matthew Rose as Polydorus highly reminiscent of Debussy, particularly of Pelleas et Melisande. But that might be just the effect of the French language to merge the musical progression into an apparently seamless experience.

Laurence Kilsby’s tenor as narrator was beautifully clear throughout and Willaim Thomas singing the part of Herod was darkly threatening. Kate Lindsey and Gordon Bintner as Mary and Joseph were at times operatic, as they needed to be, and the singing of the chorus was completely in tune with the nature of the music that we heard. The offstage voices here were behind a curtain at the back of the stage in this performance, and their ethereal resonance was superbly done. Mark Elder, for whom the music of Berlioz is something special, chose slow tempi throughout, which allowed the reflective beauty of some surprising harmonies to show through.

And so to the strange part. In the middle of part three of the oratorio, Berlioz writes a trio – perhaps signifying the holy family? – where the performance becomes chamber music. Spotlit and not conducted, two flutes and a harp play an interlude of several minutes and the music here is simply divine. It is so surprising, so memorable for someone like me who has consistently ignored the work that this sound will live on for the rest of my life.

In this work, L’enfance du Christ, Hector Berlioz seems to kneel reverently throughout in whispered prayer. He might, on occasions, appear to want to up the tempo or increase the volume, but he always holds back, and always puts lyricism and communication before effect. It will not be long before I listen again.