Yui Higashijima in Schumann's Piano Concerto with the Elche Orchestra under Achim Holub in ADDA, Alicante

 

Yui Higashijima won the third Alicante Piano Competition “Gonzalo Soriano” in 2025. As part of her prize, she was invited to play a concerto with the Elche Symphony Orchestra. The Schumann Piano Concerto was chosen, and last night she played the concerto with the orchestra in one of three concerts in the cycle. This particular concert took place in the ADDA auditorium in Alicante, and there will be another performance in Torrevieja tonight.

As one of the organisers of the competition in Alicante, I would be expected to give a positive review of the concert and the playing of the soloist. I will not disappoint. But I will go considerably further than that.

I have heard the Schumann Piano Concerto many times in concert and literally hundreds of times in broadcasts and recordings. As anyone who reads my reviews regularly will already know, I maintain that I have a musical blind spot when it comes to Robert Schumann. I often find his music rather empty, with emotion worn on the sleeve of his frockcoat to make up for the absence of the real thing. Well, I realized last night that, in order to understand this music, I needed someone who could communicate the musical experience with both confidence and vision.

The first thing to note is the tempo marking on the first movement. It is “alegro affettuoso”. Now, in previous hearings of the work, I was never musically conscious of the intellectual conflict that Schumann wanted to describe. The conflict is between a youthful vigorous figure and more contemplative character who is conscious of humanity’s darker side. Whether on previous occasions this conflict has been lacking in the interpretations I have heard or whether I missed it in my eagerness to pre-judge the composer, I have no idea.

But last night in the hands of Yui Higashijima, and under the expert and committed direction of Achim Holub, the musical conflict took centre stage. Soloist and conductor were not afraid to vary the tempi to stress the dialogue which leads to conflicting arguments. Now this sounds simple, but in performance it requires discussion, rehearsal and execution. Anyone who has performed in public will know that “getting it done” can be paramount. To exert control and interpretation to this level of performance is a real achievement and both soloist and conductor were of the same mind. Together, they opened the ears of this particular listener, who came away from the performance, as if hearing the work for the first time. Perhaps I had heard it for the first time, all the previous occasions, being “hearings”, not “listenings”.

Yui Higashijima’s performance of the piece was simply outstanding. She brought meaning and shaped to every phrase of the score. Achim Holub’s conducting was expert. He demanded a lot of the Elche Orchestra and the players responded with perfection. I will simply never listen to the concerto again, or indeed, Robert Schumann’s music in general, without having this performance in mind as a new benchmark.

Yui Higashijima followed with an encore of one of Mozart’s well-known rondos, the one in D major K485. It was interesting to hear how she played this familiar music. She managed to emphasize the surprises without being without losing the overall playfulness of Mozart’s music. Perhaps Yui Higashijima worked magic with Mozart as well!

The concert was subtitled “Portraits of Romanticism”, and the phrase was important. Having heard Schumann’s mid-century version, we then heard the Elche Orchestra under Achim Holub perform the Symphony No. 4 of Johannes Brahms from 1885. By the fourth symphony, it seemed that Brahms had relaxed a little. Again, the music was given space to express itself and it did so with expert guidance and playing. When last year the same orchestra also played the Brahms Symphony No. 4 in a concert, I wrote that there were some difficulties with the experience. The first movement on that occasion lacked shape. Not so on this occasion, when clearly the direction of Achim Holub made a real difference that reshaped the experience. Last year, the work was listed as lasting 42 minutes and this year it was 45. The three minutes extra were probably of the result of Achim Holub’s choice of tempi. Clearly an expert in the performance of Brahms symphonies, he conducted from memory and successfully transmitted his personal feelings for the music to the orchestral playing, which was nothing less than superb.

 

 

Carl Orff's Carmina Burana in Cluj

The Academic College – Auditorium Maximum, Cluj-Napoca

Choir and Orchestra of the Transylvania State Philharmonic

Gergely Madaras conductor

Andreea Guriță Novac soprano

Andrea Mirchev tenor

Geani Brad baritone

Carl Orff - Carmina Burana

Sceptical about yet another Carmina Burana, and yet I need not have worried. There was nothing else available, so I booked it.

The hall has a rounded end and at first sight would focus the sound. Well it did, but in a very musical way. What we heard was a quite brilliant acoustic, when every sound was crisp and clearly defined. Add to that the tempi choice of the conductor, Georgely Madaras, and the mix was perfect.

The tempi were all quite fast and he used quite a lot of accelerando. The music seemed to chase itself along and early on I was worried that the baritone would get left behind. Appropriately, the tenor wore a white jacket and the soprano a red dress. These soloists were all more than competent and really acted out the roles they sang. The tenor had the right mix of humour and pain to be convincing.

Above all the chorus made the evening. They were together, responsive to the tempi changes and very enthusiastic. The orchestral playing was brilliant, and the audience lapped it up, finishing with one of those applause sessions in unison that are so popular in eastern Europe.

BBC National Orchestra of Wales plays Grace Williams, Saint-Saens and Elgar under Jaime Martín with Akiko Suwanai

 

Last night’s concert in ADDA, Alicante was given by BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jaime Martín with Akiko Suwanai as soloist. On the face of the published schedule, they were just two works, the third violin concerto of Saint-Saens and Elgar’s Enigma Variations. A little short, one might think… Well think again!

The evening’s programme scheduled a third work, a substantial piece as well. It was Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches for string orchestra. At nearly twenty minutes, this rendered the concert’s length substantial at least.

Written in 1944 by its Welsh composer, Sea Sketches predates Britten's Peter Grimes, which, of course, includes the now separately performed Sea Interludes. Sea Sketches by Grace Williams comprises five movements that explore the sonorities of a string orchestra, as well as giving an impressionistic portrait of the sea in five different pictures– in wind, in song, with mysterious sirens, breaking on the shore and becalmed in summer. The textures of Grace Williams’s writing for strings stressed the coolness of a windy beach, with neo-classical flavours hardening the language of late Romanticism. One might think of Britten’s string writing when listening to Sea Sketches, but Grace Williams in the piece speaks to an audience with her own voice and communicates her own personal feelings. Grace Williams died almost fifty years ago, and her music richly deserves a wider audience.

Akiko Suwanai was soloist in Saint-Saen’s Violin Concerto No. 3. Her playing was simply breathtaking. From the work’s quiet opening and then into the opening allegro, she gave everything the work needed. If Saint-Saens was anything, he was a composer of technical mastery, and in this concerto there is both real dialogue between the orchestra and soloist and, indeed, that dialogue is always audible. The composer’s handling of the orchestra is nothing less than expert. A listener is always aware of its power to dominate, always conscious of its lines of argument, but also confident that none of the soloist’s statements will be drowned.

The slow movement was pure delight after the energy of the opening. Its longer lines allowed Akiko Suwanai to show the lyrical side of her playing, and she used the opportunity to give a beautiful performance, stressing the elegance of this music. The final allegro is again full of energy and Akiko Suwanai’s playing reproduced the communication of the first movement. It was a superb performance of the spectacular music. Akiko Suwanai gave the audience a little unaccompanied Bach has an encore. As she played alone, it was interesting to note how attentively even the orchestra listened.

Elgar’s Enigma Variations is so well-known seems unnecessary to say any more about it. But the work as a whole is not as well known as the Nimrod variation, which is often played stand-alone. It is decades since I last heard a live performance of the entire work, and I was struck by the extreme dynamics, the composer demands.

A challenge of variation writing is to keep an audience interested in the familiar. Elgar’s solution in Enigma is to present the theme and then fourteen variations which exploit the full range of orchestral possibilities. Each variation is ostensibly a portrait of an individual and the composer ups the pace by keeping the variations short, except of course, for Nimrod, which is always too short for an audience from an audience's point of view.

What had turned out to be quite a long concert finished with a Russian encore, Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla Overture. It was played with real gusto and enthusiasm, as was everything else we heard. What a delight, also, to hear a British Orchestra playing two works by British composers on a foreign tour.