Fumiaki Miura plays Mendelssohn and Mozart with ADDA, Alicante - undertstated perfection

 

“Less is more” is an expression that I have often heard when I have proffered criticisms of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Usually these words follow a criticism of mine where I use Mozart as an example of the predictability of the machinations of Classicism when contrasted with the fluidity and personal expression of nineteenth century Romanticism, or indeed the wholly personal world of twentieth century music. I have not usually given the Classical era a great deal of credibility, generally finding its products elegant, but rather repetitive and lacking in intellectual challenge. After an evening with Fumiaki Miura in ADDA, Alicante, I now understand the term “less is more” somewhat better.

Fumiaki Miura, without doubt, is one of the premiere rank of soloists currently populating the world’s concert halls. And it is rare, amongst this group of international superstars, to encounter a musical personality like that of a Fumiaki Miura, a talent that displays understatement, apparent humility and much reflection.

Fumiaki Miura’s program with the ADDA orchestra looked conventional. He opened with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Overture and then played Mendelssohn’s famous violin concerto. More Mozart opened the second half, but this was the less than familiar Little Night Serenade, K525. A stirring but entirely controlled performance of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony finished the evening. But the originality in this program came from Fumiaki Miura’s role.

It has become commonplace in recent years for a soloist also to conduct. And on this evening that is what happened. Fumiaki Meera conducted the overture and the symphony, whilst he was both soloist and conductor in the concerto. The difference, and it was a crucial difference, came in the Mozart Little Night Serenade the start of the second half.

In K525 Mozart wrote a dialogue between two orchestras. It is neither a grand work not a serious dialogue, but it remains a small orchestra effectively being a soloist in front of a larger band. So here Miura Fumiaki was leading a small group of soloists, playing himself and directing at the same time. This was wholly original. And the piece itself worked beautifully, as did the director’s choice of treating all the small orchestra as soloists of equal stature. Hence my observation of humility.

And so, on an evening where nothing on the printed programme naturally appealed or excited this particular audience member, Fumiaki Miura’s performance and direction became the memorable aspect of a memorable concert. It must also be said that Fumiaki Miura’s own playing of the Mendelssohn concerto was rapturously received by the audience and the orchestra alike. His tone high up in the violin’s range is both sweet and accurate, with none of the occasional metallic timbre that can sometimes intrude in that upper register. His playing was also undemonstrative, displayed none of the pyrotechnics that are often associated with big name performers. This was music in its purest, wholly communicative form.

As an encore, the orchestra offered a short piece of Mendelssohn, more like chamber music for orchestra than a rousing lollipop to end an evening. This too worked beautifully, and an understated but thoroughly virtuosic evening of Classicism and early Romanticism delivered surprises throughout, as well as beautiful music. For this concert goer, this less was surely more.

Campogrande, Prokofiev and Dvorak in Alicante

The placing of the world premiere alongside establish repertoire is not itself unusual. What was unusual about ADDA Sinfonica’s latest concert was the fact that the contemporary piece that started the concert was arguably the most musically conventional item on the programme.

Nicola Campogrande’s music paints wholly recognizable shapes in never jarring colours. It seems to live in familiar landscapes, often vistas that are reminiscent of film on television music. This is in no way a criticism, but I do think it is an observation that informs an approach to his style. His second symphony “A New World”, follows a conventional four movement structure, but diverges by not pursuing formal development and also by having the finale presented as a song. The whole piece lasts just fifteen minutes, which was about the time devoted to a discussion between the composer and Josep Vicent, the orchestra’s artistic director, at the start of the evening.

Nicola Campogrande explained that he began the work because he felt that the world needed a change, a new direction, clearly toward a greater amount of tolerance and cooperation, rather than division and conflict. A friend offered to write a poem that became the symphony’s finale. The message, if such a work can be summarized, is that we can build a better world if we simply accept what we are, where we are, and share things like music and singing.

Nicola Campogrande’s “A New World” proved to be as gentle on the ear as in its message from within the text. Again, this is not a criticism. We respond to suffering and pressure in our own individual way. It was, after all, Vaughan Williams, a favourite composer of mine, who responded to the carnage of the First World War with the Pastoral Symphony, a work that presents precious little played forte and boasts three slow movements. Piero Bodrato’s text presented a positive vision that we were invited to share, at least for the length of the piece. Stephanie Iranyi’s soprano voice proved perfect for this text and music.

The First World War link is important, because of the work that followed. Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto was written in 1917 and its premiere had to be postponed because of Russia’s Revolution. Conceived in an era of conflict, this is another work that seems to commemorate via suggestion a vision of a different world. But Sergei Prokofiev’s imagination lived in a truly individual and ethereal universe, which only occasionally seems even to reference the terrestrial. Twenty-year-old Ellinor D’Melon’s playing as via a soloist captured every aspect of this masterpiece. She was delicate and brash, soothing and acerbic, loud and soft, always perfectly expressive. Alongside Josep Vicent’s perfect balance in the ADDA orchestra kept the piece overall a musical whole, while allowing the soloist to shine. It was indeed a memorable performance of arguably the greatest of all violin concertos. Ellinor D’Melon’s encore lightened the mood considerably. She offered Henri Vieuxtemp’s Variations on the Yankee Doodle, a piece that allowed her to show off in the conventional concerto style that the Prokofiev masterpiece largely denied.

There is perhaps nothing new to say about Dvorak’s New World. But at the end of the 19th century, this work referenced the still revolutionary Wagner, included folk tunes in serious music and used orchestral colours and power that many audiences might have found challenging. Above all, the New World of the title was itself in reference to the idea of freedom from Europe’s feudal shackles and staid empires. The performance, as ever with the ADDA orchestra, was full of expertise and enthusiasm, a perfect mix to make even the familiar memorable.

There was a little encore, of course. Bernstein’s Mambo from West Side Story is a roof raiser. Thankfully the roof stayed on. Just.

Orchestra La Scala Milan under Riccardo Chailly in Alicante's ADDA

 A program juxtaposing two first symphonies has to invite comparison. When those first symphonies are those of Ludwig van Beethoven and Gustav Mahler, arguably at either end of the nineteenth century German Romantic tradition, then that comparison must include considerations of what happened to the style, if indeed it ever existed as an identifiable entity.

The orchestra, La Scala, Milan under its conductor Riccardo Chailly, has a tradition with Mahler symphonies, and this is very much the tradition of its conductor. Ricardo Chailly, the program noted, has over 150 recordings to his name and he also has recorded a complete Mahler symphony cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus. ADDA’s audience thus expected a lot from the evening. There was no disappointment.

Beethoven’s First Symphony was premiered in 1800. Stylistically, it is rooted in the tradition that Haydn and Mozart had created in the previous century, but from its opening, Beethoven’s first is different. While we now label the earlier era as classical, Beethoven’s first surely heralded the era of Romanticism, where the expression of individual emotions rather than structural integrity was to be the focus of artistic intentions.

The structure is there from the previous classical era. Sonata form is evident in the first movement and elsewhere. The fast, slow, minuet and finale format is preserved, but the principal keys, which still dominate the work, arrive more by suggestion than by statement and the minuet is barely danceable because its character is that of the modern scherzo. The very word implies a musical joke, perhaps a piece of trivia included to express personal feelings and reflections.

This is thus a work that represents a revolution of symphonic thinking, but this revolution was not a break with the past, more its extension and amplification into new territory. And though Beethoven’s orchestra was large for its era, it still comprised only double winds and no trombones or tuba. What characterizes the music, however, as so often in Beethoven, is the possibility that the inspiration came from the composer’s memory of dance tunes and popular music, reworked and remodelled into “serious” form.

And so to the link. At the end of that nineteenth century, Gustav Mahler announced another stylistic revolution with his first symphony, whose most noticeable difference from the Beethoven was immediately the size of the orchestra employed. There are four movements again. But now the movements pay only lip service to the formal structures of sonata form, which, like Beethoven’s introduction of the tonic, is via suggestion rather than statement. The placing of the slow movement third rather than second began with Beethoven, so this was nothing new.

But what Mahler did that was revolutionary was to incorporate folk-like melodies into the symphonic argument and render that argument largely textural. Here, the composer seems to want to explore the range of sonorities that these large forces could generate. But despite the composer’s reputation for deploying large forces, these sonorities are only rarely loud or brash. These contrasts are textural and coloristic, clearly intended to convey to the listener the quality of an experience, rather than its narrative.

A contemporary listener can only imagine what an audience in central Europe made of a slow movement that juxtaposed a funeral march based on a French children’s song with passages that derived from Jewish Klezmer dance music.

Perhaps the finale is a little too meandering and perhaps its triumphal end is overblown. But who cares? And this performance, under the watchful eye of Ricardo Chailly, was wonderfully detailed. Here we heard all the sonorities and all the dynamic changes in intricate and vivid detail. Everything seemed to make sense, even those passages where the composer seemed to delight in the tangential. The use of rubato was obvious, but never overdone. Everything made musical sense to the extent that during the first movement this listener heard the progress as a walk through scenic countryside! It is a work I have heard many times before but with Riccardo Chailly’s vision and supremely masterful reading, I now can’t wait for the next performance.

And what about the comparison, Beethoven to Mahler, mentioned at the start? Beethoven arguably invented the individual’s experiential centrality in the symphony. No longer was the form a rigid frame that had to contain certain elements. In his first symphony, Beethoven had not yet fully divested himself of the need to conform, but the innovations he introduced were well developed in Mahler’s time. By the end of that nineteenth century, the individual’s emotions and feelings had become the point of the exercise, not mere suggestion and in Mahler’s first, we meet the composer, not the structure. In fact, the whim of the composer’s intention was about to prompt others, following the current extension of harmonic complexity, to call again for the imposition of structure. There was a tradition, but perhaps by the century’s end, there was nowhere else for the style to go. And, if we were to accept popular tunes into the symphony, why not make folk culture central to the argument? A new era dawned.

Franck, Walton and Rachmaninov to open ADDA's new season

 The first concert of a new season prompts an air of expectation. A cursory glance of the program suggested nothing particularly special, excepting, of course, the anticipated and always delivered excellence of this orchestra, conductor and auditorium. Billed were a nineteenth century tone poem by an often-overlooked genius, a viola concerto, perhaps the best known in the repertoire and an ultra-late Romantic symphony in all but name, all pieces where familiarity, at least of style, suggested few surprises. How wrong can a concert goer be?

Cesar Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit is, put simply, a painting in sound. Or perhaps it is film music without the film. It’s a tone poem, that abstract form that the nineteenth century invented to allow a composer to display aural emotional interpretation to project onto the scenes of a story. The very idea of the tone poem is Romanticism enshrined. Cesar Franck’s pictures are painted with broad, free brushstrokes, but in heavy paint which texture is the surface. The thick orchestration adds drama to the musical story, which was always vivid and clear, if a tad literal.

William Walton’s Viola Concerto followed with Joaquin Riquelme as soloist. Here the textures were light, the musical language suggestive of emotion, rather than the painting of pictures. In a beautifully reflective first movement, the soloist apparently is reading from a personal diary while the orchestra, here and there, adds its comment. The compositional skill is so great that this really is a conversation between soloist and orchestra, their contributions equal, their weights different.

There’s a real burlesque of a scherzo to follow and then perhaps an over-long finale that sometimes reaches for the grandiose, but memories of the first movement’s vulnerabilities always keep the music’s feet on the ground, while its upturned face searches for clouds.

Joaquin Riquelme’s playing was both virtuosic and quietly spectacular throughout. His sympathetic and informed interpretation of the substance of the piece was matched perfectly by Josep Vicent and the ADDA orchestra. At times, it seemed that the soloist was engaged in conversation with the orchestra, but it remained a conversation that was completely intelligible and never dominated by either party. The viola’s understated presence is very easily drowned by orchestral intrusions that are too loud and, apart from a couple of woodwind passages in the first movement, this trap was consistently and skilfully avoided. The audience reception was beyond rapturous. Joaquin Riquelme offered a contrasting encore, being an allemande from a Bach suite.

And then we met Sergei Rachmaninov, but the Rachmaninov from late in his life, at a time when he no longer needed to write music the merely pleased an audience. Not that he ever did! But his Symphonic Dances stand out from the rest of his orchestral writing in that they are more abstract, less prone to indulge in sugary sweetness.

On this occasion, the piece came across as autobiographical. Perhaps the intense rhythmic sound of the opening pages is a reference to the first symphony? This would explain why the rhythm disappears from view. There were passages that were reminiscent of the second piano concerto. There were others those seemed lifted from the second symphony. And, with such a big and varied orchestra, why did the composer include a solo piano part? Certainly, it was not to fill out the harmonies. Surely this is self-referential? And there was another section where the piccolo featured above percussion. Surely this was a memory of Petrushka? And what superb orchestral playing this was, coupled with precise and insightful interpretation that imbued every section of the peace with sense and meaning.

There were two encores, one unexpected, one almost the Adda signature tune. The slow movement from Dvorak’s New World is an unusual encore. but it did provide a superb contrast to the big sound that had preceded it. The Danzon number two by Marquez is now so familiar to the Adda audience that it is almost included de rigueur. But superbly so. Two lollipops of quite different flavours.

But without doubt, the Walton Viola Concerto and Joaquin Riquelme’s stunning performance will live long in this concert-goer’s memory.  

Conrado Moya plays marimba and Shostakovich 10 brings the house down in Alicante

 

A piano concerto played in a transcription for marimba is not a common event. It is even rarer when it is the Concierto Heroico of Joaquin Rodrigo, which, unlike his moderately popular harp concerto and his enormously popular guitar concerto, is itself also quite a rarity. And so, this first half of the programme promised to be a doubly rare experience.

Rodrigo‘s Concerto is an eclectic mix. Across four movements his largely neoclassical style is here and there mixed with some modernistic tendencies, especially in the rhythms and the harmonies within the orchestral tutti. These elements are placed alongside some themes whose banality, on occasions, could generally and generously be described as “popular”. These apparently disparate strands are woven into the piano part, which ranges from the virtuosic to the repetitive. On disc it comes across as an inconsistent and only moderately successful work. Episodic would be the least critical label that might be attached to the music. Refreshing, different, and surprising would be an alternative.

But this concerto also has music of great effect, immediacy and expression. And all these qualities found expression in the playing of the marimba soloist, Conrado Mora, and in the lively interpretation offered by Josep Vicent and the ADDA orchestra.

The marimba soloist can muster only four simultaneous notes instead of the piano’s potential of ten, but the resulting lightening of texture seemed to make the musical argument, hardly linear in this piece, rather clearer. And Conrado Mora played with such virtuosity and energy the audience probably felt exhausted just watching. The arrangement itself and its execution were real triumphs of musical imagination, and the performance was rapturously applauded. An encore for solo marimba featured the instrument in a more reflective style. I think it was a piece by Keiko Abe, but please do correct me if I’m wrong.

The second half of the evening was devoted to Shostakovich’s tenth symphony, a performance that the program predicted would last 57 minutes. Josep Vincent’s tempo at the start and end of the first movement and the start of the fourth was slow, very much slower than the overall moderato of movement one’s marking. This gave the performance weight and a psychological intensity that brought the composer’s internal struggles to the fore to great effect. The balance, of course, was achieved by playing the first movement’s central outburst significantly quicker than moderately.

The scherzo was a gnashing snarl, exactly as it should be. But when the symphony is played in this way, the third movement is transformed into perhaps the emotional centre of the work. This music becomes wholly personal, probably a neurotic’s plea to be noticed as an imagined waltz is shared with a certain Elvira in what can only be a musical dream. And then, after a return to the continuing darkness, we suddenly go to the circus and meet tumbling clowns pulling faces at us, or perhaps mocking a recently deceased dictator. The performance was not only vivid, but also brilliantly interpretive. Everything made sense here.

The evening and the season finished with a rip-roaring Marquez Danzon No2 and the audience went home impatient for the start of the new season.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Daniel Harding and the Swedish Symphony play Brahms 1 and 3 in ADDA, Alicante

 

Basically, in normal circumstances I would not regard a concert offering two Brahms symphonies as resembling a cup of tea. If that’s not mixing too many metaphors… But an advantage of subscribing to a series of events is that it prompts one to attend all of them and not to try to edit experience out of reality on the basis of preconceived standpoints. To have missed Daniel Harding with the Swedish Symphony Orchestra in Brahms Three and One in Alicante would have been a big mistake.

My problem with Brahms is long standing. It’s the same with many nineteenth century novels. I can’t empathize with the characters. I feel they are often preoccupied with irrelevance, and I hear the main mode of expression as circumlocution. I have always tended to find musical equivalence of these perceived shortcomings in the work of Brahms until very late in his creative career.

But my criticisms of the nineteenth century novel could come about because this particular reader does not fully enter into the world that is being described, or the lives that are being lived. It is not a criticism of Shakespeare that his work does not address quantum mechanics. Likewise, I should not criticize Brahms’s compositions for living within the scope of their time. So, it was this new attitude of toleration that I began this first exposure to the presence of Daniel Harding!

Daniel Harding does not simply conduct the music, he shapes it. He rarely beats time and equally rarely makes bold, eye-catching gestures aimed the audience’s attention. What he does do is coax the music into shape via visual interpretations of its meaning, gestures that clearly convey the right messages to his players. Here in these Brahms symphonies, the musical experience unfolds like in the novel, the themes almost characters in the telling of the story, the harmonies the events, which often surprise.

But to shape a piece of music into such a drama, one also needs an orchestra that can deliver the parts. And here in Alicante, the Swedish Symphony Orchestra clearly has such a superb understanding with its principal conductor that collectively they understood precisely what the demands and they clearly can always deliver it.

As a result of this chemistry that was so strong it could almost be felt by the audience, we heard two beautiful performances of these cornerstones of the repertoire. Both fresh and surprising throughout, these performances of the two Brahms symphonies prompted this skeptic to listen to them again and again.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Josep Vicent, Julia Gallego perform Dvorak, Joan Albert Amargos and Holst's The Planets

 

Dvorak’s Carnival Overture provides a stunning opening to any concert. It’s exuberant, tuneful, spectacular and exciting. It’s all these things if it is played by its performers with the requisite virtuosity and enthusiasm, and neither quality is usually absent from Alicante’s ADDA Simfonica. And this was no exception. The overture shone. And shining was the theme for the whole concert, in that it was to finish with a performance of Holst’s The Planets, musical biographies of celestial bodies that regularly shine.

The concert’s first half, however, was completed by Julia Gallego playing a flute concerto called ConCERT Expres by its Catalan composer, Joan Albert Amargos. Musically this was a spectacular success in its ability to feature a soloist in front of a full orchestra all playing in a jazz idiom that seemed to preserve a feeling of improvisation, not, as so often is the case, obscuring the very quality that should underpin jazz, clearly the composer’s inspiration. The work, of course was fully scored, but it maintained a spontaneity that really did sound like free expression. And, after the concerto’s brilliant flurry of sound, an arrangement for flute solo of a Piazzolla milonga provided contrast as an encore.

And so we graduated to The Planets. This music has become so popular in parts that it takes a complete performance for audience members to be reminded of what a ground-breaking work it was and indeed remains. It’s true there are sections that sound like Debussy, and others that are pure Ravel. There are, here and there, remnants of the folk song that had so preoccupied Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. There are even moments when an aural blink might suggest Elgar, but equally the work prefigures Walton here and there.

But in the end, it’s pure Holst and, it must be remembered, The Planets was written between 1914 and 1917 during the first world war. When Mars brings war in the opening movement, it can be heard like musical journalism. The various sections of this suite are often played - especially on bit-part radio stations – as isolated pieces. But it takes a complete performance to understand their context and, frankly, symphonic conception. Viewed as a whole, this suite can become a contemporary symphony, but without obvious structure – and that’s the point. It hangs together because each section’s difference and individuality is a respected part of the whole. When viewed as such, the status of the last section, Neptune, becomes much more than just another piece. Given the work’s wartime setting, the finale might suggest that the world has just been changed for good by the conflict that still raged. The music seems to search for something lost that will never again be found. In this performance the women’s voices of the Coro Amici Musicae from Zaragoza were placed on the wings of the balcony, above and on either side of the orchestra. The strangeness of the sound world depicted in Neptune, even the century later, reminds us also of how little we can grasp about the nature of the solar system itself, let alone of the universe. It also gives an indication, perhaps, of how much the composer was influenced at the time by alternative visions of our universe, especially those originating in Indian religion.  This inspired performance was received rapturously. An encore of a gallop from Shostakovich’s Moscow Cheryomushki provided a rousing way to tell us all to go home, to start the drive home under a clear sky with unusually bright planets.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Adam Fischer, Elisabeth Leonskaja and the Dusseldorf Symphoniker in Beethoven and Mahler in Alicante's ADDA

 

I have seldom had the privilege of participating in a concert audience that showed their appreciation with such heartfelt enthusiasm. At the end of this performance of Mahler’s First Symphony, the fourth time that this symphony had been performed in this hall in recent years, this particular orchestra, the Dusseldorf Symphoniker, and this unique conductor, Adam Fischer, was cheered loud and long by admirers who stood to pay their respect to the quality of what they had just heard. Again the power of live performance is underlined as yet another life changing experience is perhaps surprisingly provided by a work whose intricacies were already familiar to most of the listeners.

And it must be said that the first half of the evening had already proved to be equally memorable via a performance of an equally familiar piece, the Emperor Concerto of Beethoven. The soloist was to have been Andras Schiff, but he had unfortunately had a fall and could not perform. We must wish him a speedy recovery.

His place at the piano was thus occupied by Elisabeth Leonskaja, no less, and she proved to be much more than a mere replacement. Throughout, her precision and touch were nothing short of breath-taking, especially in the quieter, more subtle parts of a work that too often is treated as a tour de force, which it definitely is not. The concerto provides a soloist with an opportunity to communicate Beethoven’s overall musical idea. Of course there is bravura, but as always with Beethoven, the meaning is in the contrasts, and these must be as vivid as possible. And it’s not just a matter of loud and soft, fast and slow, because the true contrast in this piece lies in the juxtaposition of tenderness alongside the boasting, intimacy alongside grandiloquence. Overall, it is a work that reminds us of our humility and humanity, though it also acknowledges that at times we have to make a show of things.

Elisabeth Leonskaja not only achieved the right balance, not only communicated these contrasts perfectly, but she also brought that something extra, that indefinable quality that we can all sense but never describe when we are in the presence of genius. And that genius became even more apparent when she offered her audience a substantial encore, a piece whish explored the impressionistic and symbolist imagery of music a century later than the work she had just performed. The result was spellbinding.

In the second half, it was the work, not the performer that was the replacement. Originally Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin had been programmed and its replacement brought a certain amount of disappointment to this particular member of the audience. I should not have been concerned, because what transpired over the fifty minutes of the second half was nothing less than miraculous.

Misgivings turned to gold as Adam Fischer’s clearly magical relationship with both the orchestra and the work unfolded. It seemed like the conductor was convinced he could drag extra expression from his players by brute force, persistence and dogged insistence. To describe him as living every note would be understatement, since his relationship with the piece is clearly deeper than that. At one point, there was real concern that he had put too much into his work as he stepped aside to take a short breather. In reality, we all needed that little space. The attention to detail was phenomenal, right down to the balance of the offstage trumpets at the start being controlled by just the right distance to leave the side doors ajar. At the end, Adam Fischer insisted that the final fanfares be delivered by standing horn players and the sound was resplendent. But again, it was in the vision of the overall balance of the symphony that Adam Fischer displayed his complete genius.

The inclusion of a Brahms Hungarian Dance as an encore certainly did not compensate for the missing Bartok, but by then we all felt that we had at least visited the conductor’s cultural home, albeit from afar.

Das Lied von der Erde in ADDA Alicante and a mention for a bass trombone concerto

This was a more than merely memorable concert, ending with the Valse Triste of Sibelius as an appropriate encore. “Appropriate” is an important term, since Mahler’s great song symphony cannot be followed any mere showing off or other lollipop.

Having completed eight symphonies and mindful of the precedent that no composer since Beethoven had completed more than nine symphonies, Gustav Mahler did not officially title Das Lied von der Erde as a symphony, despite labelling it as such in its subtitle. We know that the composer had suffered the loss of his daughter, a professional snub and the diagnosis of an incurable condition in the period that preceded the work’s composition. We also know that he became captivated with Bethge’s free translations of classical Chinese poems. These texts, if I might summarise inadequately, tend to be based in the more mundane aspects of life while alluding to the usual larger imponderables that preoccupy human thought. In many ways, this perfectly reflects Mahler’s tendency to grandiloquence via transforming and reshaping the banal.

Das Lied von der Erde is demanding of all its performers. There are many moments where attention is focused on small sections of its large orchestra, moments when it is impossible for any player to hide. On the other hand, there are abrupt and spiky orchestral tutti that have to be timed perfectly. There are times when string players have to hold very long pianissimo pedal notes and these have to be perfect to achieve their effect. The players of ADDA Simfonica were superb, of course. The singers spend the full hour on stage, and the tenor especially needs to work hard to be heard. The alto, on the other hand, has to negotiate the half hour of final song with total control. In this performance, Ramon Vargas and Cristina Faus were very much more than competent. Their voices seemed perfectly to match the demands of this work. The perfection was probably achieved via rehearsal. It was clear from the start how much time and effort all involved had devoted to getting every detail right.

And a work like this does have to hang together. Six unequal and varied movements, a change of soloist each time, a vast orchestra often called upon to play with the detail and intimacy of chamber music, all of this demands a director with more than the usual amount of control, accuracy and interpretive vision. ADDA’s artistic director, Josep Vicent, seems determined that the resident orchestra should take on challenging repertoire such as this work. And a mixture of Josep Vicent’s obvious talent and his orchestra’s dedication and determination to achieve the highest standards has thus now firmly established their partnership among the elite. I do not care which city you are in. I don’t care about reputations. I do, however, trust both my ear and my experience and for me at least this is as good an orchestra and conductor as can be found. They are worthy of their audience’s adoration, and they will surely make an international name for themselves in the very near future.

Das Lied von Der Erde is not the kind of work where an audience will naturally stand and cheer at the end. It tends to leave an audience in a reflective mood, and it also tends to live long in the memory. This audience did cheer, eventually, after the applause had continued for several minutes and the performance will live in the collective memory as long as it exists. But it is a mark of this hall’s audience’s priorities that, no matter how long the applause has lasted, it always ends with abrupt expectation with any signal for an encore.

As a footnote, I cannot offer this review of the week in Alicante’s ADDA without mentioning the extraordinary performance of José Antonio Marco Almira and Pamela Pérez that brought Daniel Schnyder’s Bass Trombone Concerto to vivid life just a couple of says before the orchestral concert. If one thought that the trombone part of this piece was demanding, one might pause to think of the job done by the pianist. What a performance!

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Through the emotions – Soler, Valero and Gandía at ADDA in Alicante

Gala Lirica, Opera Gala or merely Song Medley often labels an admixture of showcase snippets, offered, it seems, primarily to advertise a voice or commemorate a venue. Too often these evenings degenerate into a succession of star turns, offering world-stopping climaxes every three minutes or so, with each old chestnut being greeted with the audience’s enthusiasm merely because it is recognized. One is reminded of the occasions where the star is applauded over the top of the music, making it inaudible, merely because the song has been included.

At its best, this format can offer a memorable evening of fine singing that, via its very brevity, reminds an audience of a multitude of bigger experiences. At its very best, a judgment that would apply to the evening offered by Lorena Valero and Antonia Gandía in Alicante, fine voices deliver superb music and just enough acting and characterization to offer meaning without excess sentimentality. It is often an excess of false emotion that often renders these occasions less than memorable, but the right amount, as here in Alicante, adds to the experience.

These two voices, the mezzo of Lorena Valero and the superb, dramatic tenor of Antonio Gandía gave a mixed program of well-known set pieces from grand opera and, perhaps for many in this audience, a set of pieces from the less well-known world of Spanish Zarzuela. It was a world that was well known, obviously, to the two singers and especially to the conductor, Cristobal Soler, who regularly presents this genre in Madrid’s Zarzuela Theatre.

The format was clear, orchestra, solo, solo, duo and repeat. Juxtaposed with Verdi, von Flotow and Gounod, one is reminded just how unique is the sound world of Puccini. Delilah’s aria from Saint-Saens’s Samson and Delilah and Lippen Schweigen from Lehar’s Merry Widow brought the opera half to close.

After the interval, the Zarzuela began with Chueca, Marqués and Sorozábal, whose sound world is itself very sophisticated. Moreno Torroba featured large, as did Jiménez’s famous Luis Alonso Intermezzo. Fernández Caballero’s El Dúo de la Africana brought the evening to a close, but there was always going to be an encore, which was Me Llamas Rafelillo from Penella’s El Gato Montés, sung in Valenciano to the audience’s delight.

Throughout, the ADDA Simfonica played their part to perfection, as ever, with the brass especially resplendent. Loreno Valero’s voice, always accurate and never forced, coped well with some testing moments. Antonia Gandía’s tenor is a great voice throughout its vocal and dynamic range. And both singers communicated superbly with their fellow musicians, one another, and with their audience. It was an evening that went through the emotions, from love to regret, from anger to sympathy, from playfulness to aggression and ultimately to joy. These occasions often go only through the motions, but this Soler, Valero, Gandía and ADDA combination made this a night to remember.

Costa Blanca arts update - No superlatives - L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Alicante with Jonathan Nott and Emmanuel Pahud play Ibert and Mahler

 

There are insufficient superlatives to describe the experience. L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Alicante under Jonathan Nott played Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Ibert’s Flute Concerto with Emmanuel Pahud a soloist so perfectly that ratings and comparisons simply do not apply. When music is this good, it is useless trying to say ‘how’ good it was. The playing transcended descriptions of technique, superseded mere sound and attained a perfection that can only be labelled ‘communication’.

Ibert’s syncretic mix of neo-classicism, humour, jazz and surrealism was so expertly played by Emmanuel Pahud that his virtuosity was almost immediately taken for granted by his audience. Once achieved, that level of experience progresses into a changed awareness where the music is absorbed and known, rather heard or learned. Emmanuel Pahud seemed to invite everyone to participate rather than merely receive. One doubts whether in the packed auditorium there was a single person who did not feel that this was anything other than a personal experience.

And so, when presented with what, it must be said, was probably an unknown work from an under-performed composer, that packed audience found absolutely no barrier of unfamiliarity between themselves and appreciation. Like all concertos, Ibert’s Flute Concerto offers a soloist an opportunity to show off, but here the virtuosic witticism engaged the crowd rather than simply impressed it.

Emmanuel Pahud communicated with the orchestral players, but he also seemed to engage the listeners directly. He was a soloist whose complete mastery of the music and his instrument created something that transcended performance and created genuinely shared experience.

An encore, introduced to the audience’s delight in Spanish, offered a statement of solidarity with the Ukrainian people in general, but especially the soloist’s performing friends and colleagues. This was one of the Jolivet’s Incantations for solo flute, a piece from just before World War II that is prefaced by the composer’s plea a world of serene communion. It was a heart-felt and wholly appropriate message on this dark day.

In his fifth symphony, Gustav Mahler seems eventually to have approached a state of optimism, certainly ecstasy. It is a work best known for its smallest part, the adagietto, a fourth movement that is often both played extracted and often murdered in performance. Its celebrity can too easily dominate, can become the focus, and thus conductors often take it too slowly, rendering its form disembodied, disjointed and meaningless. It becomes sweetness for sweetness’s sake, separate spoons of afters that ignore the identity or obscure the composition of the dish. Not here with Jonathan Nott, however. This adagio was paced towards the andante and so the lines joined into a whole that made sense. And that whole, as far as the symphony in its entirety was concerned, became the perfection that is communication.

This work in sound was read by the audience like a novel, whose complex plot found resonance, understanding and empathy. The biting contrasts of the second movement were expertly played and this movement, which can suffer from lack of direction made perfect sense. And the finale was simply unstoppable, apparently driven by its own internal momentum, the final flourish arising from its own logic, not merely tagged on as an afterthought, as can be the case. There’s simply aren’t the superlatives to do justice to the experience. Let’s just call it perfection.

As a footnote, there must be a mention for Jordi Verges Riart, whose organ recital the night before in Benidorm also delighted. Works by Pachelbel, Buxtehude, JS Bach, Vidor and Vierne were offered chronologically with the transformation and development of style both clear and powerful. It must be said, however, despite the finale of Vierne’s first organ symphony that concluded the recital, the major chord ending of Buxtehude’s G minor prelude provided the most powerful memory.

 

Jurowski and Kavakos with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin at ADDA Alicante

There is nothing standard about performance, nothing predictable about experience, unless, of course, it is drained of all communication by an imperative to supply a product. Then, perhaps only then, strictures of form take over and dominate. And a concert program featuring Mozart’s Don Giovanni Overture, the Brahms Violin Concerto and then Schubert’s Ninth Symphony might just sound a little run-of-the-mill, highly susceptible to the kind of delivery that might pander first to audience expectations and only then to interpretation. Expectations were thus not high, though it was pleasant to be back in Alicante’s ADDA auditorium without designated vacant seats to enforce social distancing. At least we were an audience again. 

Initial impressions were that this touring Orchestra, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, would be quite small, since the chairs arranged on the stage seemed to leave significant spaces. But, at least in the scale of orchestration, none of these works approaches the grandiose, despite the fact that Schubert clearly did apply the term to his work’s duration.

On reflection, how could any concert be considered humdrum when the conductor is Vladimir Jurowski and the soloist Leonidas Kavakos?

And what about, from first note to last, the resplendent bright sound of this orchestra’s strings? They have a texture that seems sharp, in its attack, not its tonality! There seems to be an edge, for want of a better word, that shapes the phrases of the music into something much more than reproduction, much more than reading off the page. The brilliance of the sound surprises, rendering even the completely familiar into new experience. And so Mozart’s overture was suitably dramatic, but also fresh and even surprising. After a month without orchestral sound, the opening chords worked magic.

Vladimir Jurowski is tall. Leonidas Kavakos is taller. During the long orchestral introduction to the Brahms concerto, he faced the orchestra. This, surely, was no more than an indication of how much this soloist regarded the orchestra as his partner rather than as his vehicle. And the Brahms concerto is an integrated work, a true collaboration between orchestra and soloist, never a competition. The quality of shared experience was communicated perfectly by the performers and so, even in this work that the audience had heard so many times before, they collectively breathed fresh air into the auditorium. And the audience breathed freely, despite the masks. The perfection achieved on stage translated into a forty-minute performance that was received by a packed audience in complete silence, with every note registered and every phrase understood. This was communication, not mere bravura. Leonidas Kavakos offered an encore of solo JS Bach and, after the Brahms, the understatement was almost more intense than what had preceded it.

In some hands Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, the so-called Great C Major, can go on a bit. This performance was advertised as lasting fifty minutes, so clearly not all the repeats were played. They very rarely are.

But it must be recorded that under Jurowski’s baton, this lengthy work came across as fresh, original and committed. There was not a single note in the hour when anyone in the audience felt that this was standard repertoire being delivered with standard interpretation. This felt particularly special.

The second movement, alongside the trio section from the scherzo, could be mistaken for Mahler, almost a century early. It is worth remembering, as the program notes pointed out, that Schubert never heard the work, that it was not premiered until over a decade after its composer’s death and that, at the time, musicians who saw the work considered it is difficult, unplayable and probably many other things that they dare not say because it did not conform with their expectations. Or perhaps, given a modern analogy, they considered the effort required as being above their pay grade. This performance by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under Jurowski did reproduce a sense of freshness and originality, perhaps something like Schubert had envisaged, the sound world that mystified the composer’s contemporaries. This time the mystery was enlightening.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - ADDA presents Garcia Abril and Kallinikov

ADDA Simfonica’s second concert of the season something of a rarity, in that it featured just two works, neither of which would have been familiar even to the music devotees in attendance. The fact that this now superb orchestra visited this unfamiliar territory so easily and with such quality of communication is testament to the fact that the band is now an established, mature musical force. And all of this was accomplished under a guest conductor, Manuel Hernandez-Silva, who was directing the orchestra for the first time.

 The first half featured the viola of Isabel Villanueva in the Cantos do Ordesa by Anton García Abril. The composer’s music may well not be widely known inside Spain, let alone outside and this particular work, essentially an episodic viola concerto, illustrated the composer’s highly individual style.

Composed in 2012, Cantos de Ordesa is a perfect example of García Abril’s style. The expected elements of twentieth century Spanish music are all present, but Garcia Abril often seems to cut phrases short, leaving them unfinished to merge into different impressions, the whole apparently a compressed, almost impressionistic succession of experiences, stitched together like a jump cut film. Thus, while the material may often suggest a familiarity, the way episodes are juxtaposed evokes a dream-like experience of a familiar reality. The overall effect seems to be similar to a collage made from familiar images that have been cut together in a wholly unexpected way. At least this is how the orchestral writing this piece comes across.

The solo part, admirably played by Isabell Villanueva, is another matter, however, in that it is a truly demanding virtuoso amplification and exploration of the orchestral material. The solo part inhabits the same landscapes as the orchestra, but in a far more complex and exploratory way, rendering the overall effect both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, but sometimes also suggesting that the soloist is competing with the orchestral forces. Throughout, the sense of music for film is never far from the composer’s conception, which is no surprise since García Abril did compose much music in the genre. Antonio Garcia Abril died in March 2021. Isabella Villanueva offered one short encore, Nana from Manuel de Falla’s Popular Songs.

The other work on the program was Kallinikov’s first symphony. First performed in 1897, this is a large work in very much the style of Borodin. The composer uses folk melodies alongside sophisticated orchestration and occasional rhythmic invention, though there is always the sensation that the composer preferred the music of his past rather than that of his contemporaries. There is no overt modernism here, at least none of the type that Richard Strauss or Gustav Mahler might have used at around the same time.

The overall effect of the symphony, however, is thoroughly satisfying musical experience. This is not at work which will shock, nor will it lift an audience to a frenzy of excitement. But it will lead its listeners along a path that is the musical equivalent of a novel with a linear plot, where the focus lies in what happens to the characters rather than a psychological analysis of their motives, more Turgenev than Dostoyevsky.

The concert presented what was probably the first experience of the music of either composer for the majority of the audience. Its success was testament to the vastness and quality of the repertoire and it ought to suggest to other artistic directors that risks are there to be taken, and taken successfully.

 

Costa Blanca Art Update - Alicante's ADDA Symphony Orchestra begins a new season

A new season of orchestral concerts in Alicante’s ADDA opened with a blast, rather than a bang. The blast in question came at the end of the opening work, which was appropriately enough Shostakovich’s Festival Overture. The concert cycle is called Festiva and artistic director, Josep Vicent, has assembled an impressive mix across the twenty scheduled concerts. This opener, as with all recent concerts, had to be played twice on consecutive evenings because Covid restrictions limit the hall to half capacity. Even second time through, the program shone and glittered via the superb sound the resident orchestra now generates.

Shostakovich’s Festive Overture is something of a musical joke. It raises naivety to the level of satire in that its vast triumphal fanfares celebrate a musical progression through the indisputably trite. But as ever, Shostakovich convinces us on every one of the multiple levels that the work confronts. The blast, by the way, came at the end when the audience was surprised by the standing participation of ten extra brass players who had been previously and anonymously seated in the boxes on either side of the stage. Three extra trumpets, three trombones and for horns added the extra weight to the coda and the sound was breathtakingly resplendent. It was an experience that reminded this member of the audience of the ENO’s production of Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk in the 1980s when an onstage brass band similarly emphasized the explosive and expletive elements in the operas incandescent score. Then the players were all dressed in bright red military uniform with greatcoats and officers’ hats and all impersonated Joseph Stalin.

Second on the opening concert’s program was the Double Piano Concerto by Philip Glass. The soloists were the Lebeque sisters who have admirably championed this and other contemporary works.

It was an interesting piece with which to follow the Shostakovich, since it transports the audience from a symphonic overture that glorifies the trite and crass in complicated ways, to Philip Glass’s minimalism, whose reputation for simple repetition of arpeggios belies the complex reality of this subtle music. Yes, the chord progression that underpins the work may effectively be a chaconne - is Neo-Baroque a relevant term? - but the constant rhythmic variation renders the material much more than repetitive. There are admittedly no show-off cadenzas for the soloists, no obvious technical gymnastics seeking applause for mere completion, but there is an almost constant jousting between all participants in fights for rhythmic space within the world the composer restricts to a melodic corner. The result is a fascinating interplay between the soloists, between the combined soloists and the orchestra, and even between different sections of the orchestra. The Lebeque sisters offered an encore from the Four Movements by Philip glass and by the end the hypnosis was triumphant in its own quiet, understated way.

The concert’s second half was devoted to one of the greatest masterpieces of the concert repertoire, Prokofiev’s second Romeo and Juliet Suite. This is music about which everything possible has been said, so this review will make out with your personal comments.

No matter how many times I hear the piece, I cannot but marvel at the idea, in Friar Laurence, at the genius that gave a gentle melody to the bassoon and tuba. And why, when we first hear the love theme on the clarinet, is one note lengthened, never to be repeated thereafter? The score has a stress on the note, but it’s still a crotchet. The orchestral playing was magnificent and the reading of the score superb except… Having killed off the lovers at the end of suite number two, the pianissimo ending conveying true tragedy, in this concert performance we concluded with the Death of Tybalt from the first suite. Musically it brought the evening to a brilliant close, but intellectually it made little sense. It’s a minor point.

We then had three encores. The blast from Shostakovich was repeated, complete with extra brass from the boxes and then Piazzolla’s Oblivion was just about audible! But beautiful. And finally, we had a rousing Latina American dance, the Danzon of Marquez, just a round off the opening evening. There’s 19 more like this in the season.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Cassado and Chopin in Alfas del Pi, Stravinsky and Elgar in Alicante

 

Just over a year ago, it would not have been anything special to declare that it had been possible to attend four quality concerts in this area over three days. And then there was covid. Here is Spain, we had a strict initial lockdown, but since then schools have stayed open and some cultural spaces have kept running in spite of restrictions on numbers. Before saying anything else, it is necessary to remind oneself that the new norm has involved social distancing, fifty per cent capacity for venues, compulsory hand sanitiser, masks, the recording of contact details and a temperature test on entry. This has severely restricted audience’s willingness to attend and has persuaded many, perhaps a majority of venues to cease activity altogether. In addition, performers’ travel has been as restricted as the population in general, despite there being the possibility of exemption permits for work. The combination of restrictions on travel, availability of travel and reluctant venues has severely curtailed cultural activity, however, and there have been many perennial supporters of live events who have expressed the opinion that such gatherings should not be happening during a pandemic. Opinion is on one side, while the law places the limits. Also, many more elderly regular attendees have decided that now is the time to lock up and stay in. Individuals have made their own choices.

And now, on the day that bars and restaurants can open until ten o’clock in the evening and when cultural venues can admit seventy-five per cent of their capacity, it was under the previous, more severe restrictions that saw concerts on Friday evening, Saturday lunchtime and evening and Sunday lunchtime in Alfas del Pi and Alicante.

On Friday in Alfas del Pi, Antonio Garcia Egea and Fernando Espi joined as Duo Arbos to play a works from the repertoire of violin and guitar. This was the kind of programme one does not encounter often. It started conventionally with Spanish Dance no5 by Granados, but Carlo Domeniconi’s Sonatina Mexicana has probably not figured often on concert programmes in the last year. It has probably never been followed by Ravi Shankar’s El Alba Encantada, and the microtones of Indian music have probably never before led into Paganini’s Cantabile! Astor Piazzolla’s Historia del Tango, Bourdel 1900 and Café 1930 followed by Libertango was conventional in comparison, as perhaps was Pablo Sarasate’s Playera Romanza Andaluza, despite the understated but stratospheric virtuosity of the ending of the violin part. We finished the evening with Fernandon Espi’s own Impromptu and we were particularly grateful in these times to be taken by the performers on such a varied journey.

On Saturday lunchtime the orchestra at ADDA (Auditori de la Diputacion de Alicante) marked fifty years since the death of Igor Stravinsky with a breath-taking performance of Petroushka. Yes, it’s a work that the majority of the audience had hear many, many times, but it remains a work that is fresh with every new exposure and particularly so in this reading by Josep Vicent, whose reading of this music is faultless. The colours were always vivid, the scenes clear and beautifully depicted in this work that paints with sound. We also heard a superb reading of the Elgar Cello Concerto by Damian Martinez and then had encores of the Valse Triste of Sibelius and, and true to the form of current concerts, a short piece of Piazzolla, Oblivion, with the leader’s violin as soloist.

Then on Saturday evening, back in Alfas del Pi Duo Fortecello, the cello and piano of Anna Mikulska and Philippe Argenty, gave the first of their two concerts. This one featured works by Chopin, Nocturne opus 9, Cello sonata and Polonaise Brillante coupled with Piazzolla (yet again!) in the form of the Triptyque "la Trilogie de l'Ange" and finally the Danse Macabre of Saint-Saens. We only just made the curfew…

Then on Sunday, Duo Fortecello presented their second programme in Albir. While their first programme was the epitome of the conventional, the second was as opposite as it is possible to be. They opened with Joaquin Nin’s Seguida Española and followed with what proved to be a rare gem. Gaspar Cassado wrote a famous sonata for cello and piano based on old Spanish tunes, but this Sonata en la menor, though from the same year, 1925, is quite different in character. Exactly how many times this work has been performed in Spain cannot be assessed, but it is certainly not many times. And it may have been performed elsewhere even less. The work itself is superb and deserves to be much more widely heard, especially when it is compared to other works that form the basis of the repertoire for cello and piano. Any music lover will find great reward in searching out this work and hearing it performed. It has to be said that the fourth movement, Paso Doble, does not live up to the quality of the first three, but the criticism is minor. How many composers, after all, were capable of writing finales that lived up to their preceding movements?

Anna and Philippe continued with a Flamenco solo for cello by Rogelio Huguet y Tagell and then Andaluza by Granados. Manuel de Falla’s Siete Canciones Populares Españolas is music of genius and Gaspar Cassado’s Requiebros, though derivative, is a superb way to finish any concert. And so the duo had given a musical tour of Spain, visiting most regions and sampling its musical soul. Superb. And what a relief from current preoccupations!

Costa Blanca Arts Update - ADDA Simfonica in Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Mozart

The symphony orchestra may rank among the most important of all human inventions. The fact that the very idea is absurd makes it a gem of human achievement. Around a hundred human beings, who have devoted their lives to mastering techniques in the use a technology invented specially for this product-less purpose. They join together in the presence of an audience, who is only in attendance to share the both intangible and abstract experience of hearing sounds, sounds that have been concatenated by the imagination of others who generally are not even present. The absurdity of the exercise can only be imagined. The permanence of its effect cannot be overstated.

The fact that we have concerts at all in these virus-dictated times is, in itself, a miracle. Duly temperature-checked at the door, socially-distanced and only in attendance by virtue of the musicians’ willingness to perform the same program twice each time, at six o’clock and then again at nine, we are privileged to assemble in Alicante’s ADDA concert hall. And this has happened three times in the last two weeks for this particular participant.

And, after some months away from real live orchestral sound, the opening phrases of Edward Tubin’s Estonian Dance Suite provided an immediate and major thrill. Tubin’s reputation for musical conservatism does not prepare the listener for the harmonic and rhythmic surprises in his work. We followed that with the performance by Adolfo Guitiérrez of Shostakovich’s second cello concerto, whose almost neurotic, obsessive concentration seemed to tap the general anxiety we are all feeling these days. Adolfo Guitiérrez had the time and energy to play and a little encore by Benjamin Britten, despite having to do the whole thing again just two hours later. We then heard the Symphony No. 1 of the fourteen-year-old Felix Mendelsohn. The music seems to fit the mental image of the early teenager in a frock coat and a cravat parading as a precocious adult. In some ways, the almost deliberate recourse to complexity, the calculated varied modulations of key speak of this lad frantically staking his claim to adulthood. The fact that the work convinces and generates communicative experience is testimony to the young man’s invention and genius, indeed success in his personal project. Anu Tali’s conducting debut in Alicante was thus a brilliant success.

The second trip was for a concert devoted to the memory of José Enrique Garrigós, who was a significant figure in the business and cultural life of the province. He died last year and was clearly an acquaintance of Joesp Vicent, ADDA Simfonica principal conductor and artistic director. Josep Vicent also clearly has special regard for the major work on the program, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique.

But the concert began with a finale, the final jota from the Three Cornered Hat of Manuel de Falla. The piece was perhaps a long-term favorite of José Enrique Garrigós and perhaps gave an insight as to how he himself wanted to be remembered. There followed a performance of Raise The Roof, a timpani concerto by American composer Michael Daugherty. To describe Javier Eguillor’s performance as soloist as virtuosic would almost belittle the achievement. Rarely silent throughout the work, the work began with an aurally blinding flash of a cymbal roll. The timpani then offered their notes to the orchestra, which then proceeded to play with and amongst them throughout a first movement that was almost entirely pentatonic. Overall, the piece layered gloss on gloss, sparkle on glitter to provide almost an evaporation of emotion and brilliance.

And then we had Tchaikovsky six. Certain pieces of music, quite rarely, it has to be said, only grow by greater exposure. Each time such pieces say something bigger, reveal layers of nuanced meaning previously missed or merely impact on the listener in a more vivid, immediate way. This Tchaikovsky symphony is one such piece. This particular performance I would place a few centimeters short of life-changing. A closer brush with raw experience might even have been dangerous. After the turbulence, the paroxysms and the joy, we were left with the pianissimo of two notes on the basses, sawn rather than bowed, the cuts of the last ties with hope. Strangely enough, such overt despair makes everyone, eventually, feel better, because the only remaining way is up. I am reminded that in the same hall in less than two months I expect to hear a performance of Shostakovich Symphony No. 4, which finishes with precisely the same two note fate in the basses, but repeated like a torture.

And so to the third of the recent orchestral events. Programmatically this one was unusual in that it presented a Saint-Saens-Mozart sandwich. Three shorter pieces by Saint-Saens, the Andromache overture, Spartacus and the Dance Macabre, surrounded the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20. The Saint-Saens showed off the orchestra to great effect, the brilliant orchestration producing color and effect in an almost Proust-like stream of consciousness, albeit considerably shorter. The brilliance of the composer’s orchestration contrasts with his musical conservatism, but the whole assembles like an Impressionist painting, albeit of a generation earlier than the composer’s own life.

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 is a different experience from those previously described. This is a quiet, understated, deeply personal work the bursts with emotional states that are not advertised like self-promotion or worn like jewelry. The writing is subtle, reticent, suggestive of some deeper emotional experience than that being related to the listeners. It is a piece that needs a pianist with perfect touch married to an ability to communicate, a transparent virtuosity that allows the music to quietly come before technique, but a technique perfect enough to admit moments of sympathetic variations of emotion. The soloist achieving this perfection with apparent ease was none less than Maria João Pires.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Prisuelo-Sanford and Ars Musicandum in Alicante

 

Like most places on the planet, the pandemic has denied us the opportunity of hearing live music in a hall with volume for several months. Our last concerts in Alfas del Pi were in the first week of March, so imagine the elation created by the granting of free tickets by ballot to two restricted-access contemporary music events in ADDA, Alacante! And imagine the elation produced by the quality of the experience generated!

In one of the most original musical evenings of some sixty years of concert-going, Mario Prisuelo and Maximiliano Sanford offered an evening entitled Oceánica - Un océano no siempre tranquilo….  It was billed as a dance event, but the program suggested a piano recital. Intrigued, we awaited the start with the Steinway up against the left edge of the stage. The dancer entered from within the audience, to a refrain of four notes, slapped with his palms against a bare chest. He continued as his pianist also took the stage and loosened his formal tie. And then the concert began with the Opus 34 Preludes of Shostakovich. The four slaps, clearly, were a toneless version of DSCH, Shostakovich’s musical signature, indicating the presence of a vulnerable individual, no more, no less.

Mario Prisuelo’s playing of the Preludes was breathtakingly beautiful. Maximiliano Sanford danced an interpretation of the music, his ability to leap headfirst and land silently was beautiful as well as both evocative and unintrusive. The combination could have failed, could have been overtly pretentious, but in fact it worked supremely well, the movement complementing and interpreting the musical shapes. The contrasting allegro and adagio, major and minor being seen via this inventive choreography as deeply felt emotion, a Romanticism that many might not associate with the music of Shostakovich.

A short speech located the whole experience as a voyage to Ithaca, a perfect destination where an individual can obtain self-realization, despite threats along the way. Projected text floated across the stage and at no point did it intrude into the musical space.

At the end of the piece, the performers advanced the piano across the stage, probably to signify progress on the journey. Then we heard El Amor y La Muerte, Love and Death by Granados with a change in choreographic style. The late Romanticism of Granados might have jarred after the Shostakovich, but in fact the music sounded almost more contemporary then what went before. It was as if the progress on the ideal journey generated joy and enthusiasm in the quest, and this despite the strange foreboding that characterizes this piece, which perhaps signified some of the dangers that had to be overcome on the way.

Another piano progress took the instrument to just right of center stage. Our dancer was probably exhausted by now and spent much of the next piece lying motionless on the floor. It was apposite because the piece was Shadow by Rebecca Saunders. We were perhaps at the point in the journey where the endpoint seems to have receded and all experience seems to oppress, to oppose, to turn to nothing. The music repeatedly pounded our potential hero into the ground, and he was left alone.

The piano progressed again to the right edge of the stage. And the final piece was a neoclassical-cum-minimalist celebration of rhythm, David del Puerto’s Danza. It was the achievement of the goal, the end of the journey, but unreflective in its elation, its apparent rhythmic progress leading eventually to precisely nowhere. Nowhere, that is, except a return to the realization that whatever goal we set ourselves, we begin as an individual and complete our task as that same individual, still vulnerable, still putting out those four tones on our bare chest, DSCH, me, just me. Nothing more. What a superbly thought out and presented experience this was.

That was Saturday evening and, at lunchtime on Sunday, we were two rows back in the same hall at ADDA in Alicante for a performance by Ars Musicandum, a saxophone quartet. What was intriguing about this concert was its presentation of a programme of music by composers who were all from the same small town, Rafal, population 4500, south of Alicante.

We began with a Romantic Quartet by Agustin Bertomeu, born 1928. Written in a pre-dominantly neo-classical style, it mixed rhythmic exploration and clear lines with occasional harmonic clashes.

Next was Subreptos by Sixto Herrero, who is the soprano player and spokesperson for the band. This was a piece written in neo-primitive style, where line and harmony were not the goals. The four saxophones visited the droning horns of Tibetan temple music, the sung-through mumbling of Australian didgeridoos, the sounds and occasionally timeless meandering of the Japanese flute. I am sure there were more influences as well. Overall, the primitivism reminded us of how foreign and utterly strange this imagined, but still utterly human sound world now seems to ears trained to expect tonality, rhythm and form.

The third piece was AL-LA by Jesus Mula, another composer from Rafal and the final piece by Sixto Herrero was Aonides del Viento. There was cultural deconstruction, popular themes and Bach-like chorales, even a fugue of sorts, becoming fractured and jagged.

Overall Ars Musicandum presented a sophisticated, complex musical argument that was communicated lucidly and expertly by the quartet. There were two encores, both arrangements by Sixto Herrero and the group received rapturous applause for the brilliant performance.

It’s been a long time. But what a comeback!