Sunday, December 10, 2023
Tuesday, January 17, 2023
Folk song, dance and ritual - ADDA Simfonica with Ramon Tebar and Juan Perez Floristan
In another loosely themed concert, ADDA Simfonica
played four works written in the forty years that spanned the dawn of the
twentieth century. In different ways, these works address religious, folk and
popular culture from central and eastern Europe, though the range of styles may
have obscured whatever thematic links that may have cemented them. Under guest
conductor Ramon Tebar, the ADDA orchestra opened the concert with the Russian
Easter Festival Overture by Rimsky-Korsakov. The composer’s idea was to
synthesize popular religiosity with the theatre to arouse feelings of
nationalism. And so in an overture that lasts a quarter of an hour, the
composer displays great technical prowess without really exploring many musical
ideas. The playing was superb, the material less so.
The Hungarian composers Béla Bartók and Zoltan Kodaly were both personal friends and musical collaborators. They set out at the start of the twentieth century to note down and thus preserve the nation’s folk music, specifically the rural peasant songs that were likely to disappear under the tide of modernization. Both composers used much of the material they collected in their own compositions, sometimes literally via quotation and sometimes, especially in Bartok’s case, by implication via the extraction of a musical language. Thus the harmonies, scales and sometimes the themes themselves appear in the music.
Bartok’s first piano concerto is not overtly folkloric. It’s a work of the 1920s, written to provide a vehicle for the composer’s own playing, but also to allow him to clarify the stylistic character of his compositional style, which was a rejection of romanticism, atonality and neoclassicism. Bartok wanted to unite the discipline of Bach with the structure of Beethoven and the harmony of Debussy. But he wanted to achieve this using some of the tools he had wrought from the folklore tradition.
The result was a rhythmic, percussive First Piano Concerto that makes massive demands on the soloist. Some approach the work as if it were a gymnastic challenge, where the goal is the completion of the exercise merely without fault. But this concerto needs a soloist who can not only rise to the challenge but also interpret the nuances, register the contrasts. Juan Perez Floristan did that very well. Overall, the reading of the work, however, seemed to this listener to duck the opportunities to vary the tempi and the loosen the rhythms, thus losing any sense of jazz, which I personally think enhances this music. I admit that this criticism is nit-picking, however. The Debussy Prelude, the Girl With The Flaxen Hair was as Juan Perez Floristan pointed out, in keeping with the evening’s theme.
Zoltan Kodaly dealt with the folklore influences more literally than Bartok. His oft-performed work, Dances of Galanta, was inspired by a gypsy band in his hometown. The work’s five sections are played without a break and the music speeds up towards a breathless and spectacular conclusion. On this occasion witnessed some beautiful orchestral playing.
And speaking of beauty, what can match Richard Strauss’s music to Der Rosenkavalier? The music is obviously thicker in texture than what had gone before and it differed in being based on popular dance than on folkloric influence. From the first notes, there was suddenly more space in the music. The effect, of course, was deliberately theatrical and lusciously so.
The ADDA orchestra played the work expertly and allowed
the humanity of the music to shine through its obviously technical demands. The
solo contributions were faultless but what shone the brightest were the
beautiful string tones that this orchestra now achieves. Der Rosenkavalier is a
work that takes the process of human relationships seriously, whilst apparently
dismissing their overall importance. What is important now will not seem will
not cause the blink of an eye by tomorrow, or maybe in an hour. Enjoy what life
presents and enjoy it now. But for many in this audience, the sheer beauty of
this music will be an enduring experience.
Sunday, December 11, 2022
Direction of travel - Copland, Bartok and Bernstein in ADDA, Alicante
There were many themes, but the enduring intellectual idea was surely the experience of the immigrant in the United States of America. The composers represented, Copland, Bartok and Bernstein, all had immigrant experience in their private reality. Copland’s family originated in Russian Lithuania, Bernstein’s in Ukraine and Bartok, of course, was himself Hungarian, but resident in the United States when he wrote his last piano concerto. Eugene Goossens, who provided the theme for the Copland variation that opened the program, was British, but he spent many years in the United States, and also in Australia. And, of course, Bernstein’s masterpiece, West Side Story, was set amongst the Puerto Rican immigrant community living in New York.
Immigrants can often feel like outsiders, excluded from local culture and therefore in search of their own identity. And this feeling of detachment, perhaps not exactly estrangement, came across musically in the works chosen. I found the musical similarity, not in the notes, but in the overall concept, of the second movement of the Bartok, the Copland Quiet City and the Somewhere theme from West Side Story a tightening thread that bound these works together.
Gentle but slightly dissonant string tones characterize Bartok’s night music, which can be described as “eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies”. The third piano concerto’s second movement is in this style and forms the emotional heart of the peace. Bartok was not only exiled when he wrote this music, but also ill and penniless. No wonder the harmonies suggest unsettled, insecure feelings.
In Quiet City, Aaron Copland tries to depict New York at night, when a clearly lonely young Jewish man blows a trumpet through the silence. The answering call of the cor anglais is like an echo, but it seems to recall a former life now lost, rather than a playback of current experience. And then to Bernstein and Somewhere which, in the orchestral suite, concludes the piece with an unsettling clash of harmonies, suggesting not only estrangement from community, but also death.
Now these musical and intellectual threads, so beautifully drawn together by this orchestra’s perfect playing, did not arise by chance. This wonderful musical experience was clearly thought through by the inspired artistic director at ADDA, Josep Vicent. And not only did it work, but he created one of the most memorable concerts I have ever had the privilege of attending.
We started with a short piece, the Copland
contribution to the Jubilee Variations. Eugene Goossens provided the theme, and
ten other composers wrote one variation each. We heard just the one by Aaron
Copland, two minutes of the composer being his most American.
Then the Bartok piano Concerto No. 3 followed, featuring Jose de Solaun as soloist. To describe this performance as memorable would do it an injustice. The understanding and communication between director, soloist and orchestra was palpable in a work that can sometimes not knit together. In this performance it came across as a perfect unit, perfected by the playing. The slow movement was particularly memorable. The pianist then played two solo pieces by Debussy as encores for an adoring audience.
Quiet City by Aaron Copland opened the second half. Josep Vicent placed the solo trumpet high on the balcony at the side of the stage and its answering cor anglais on the opposite side of the auditorium. It was a theatrical masterstroke, serving to emphasize the separateness and the loneliness of being a member of a minority amidst a sprawling and perhaps oppressive city.
And then the rip-roaring suite from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein allowed the orchestra to show off its virtuosity, an opportunity that the ADDA orchestra grasped with abandon. But this piece, despite its mambo, despite its big band jazz, despite its finger clicking, is eventually tragic. Star-crossed lovers die and the loss is deeply felt in the music, to such an extent that a piece that in theory arouses and excites, eventually deflates with its gut-wrenching sadness.
And then the direction really came into its own. Josep
Vicent had chosen to include two encores and they provided yet another layer to
the musical and intellectual threads. First, he chose to repeat the mambo with
just a little audience participation. This was the lollipop that again got the
audience rocking. But then, we had the funeral march from Beethoven’s seventh
symphony, a reminder perhaps of the tragedy that we befell the immigrant
community in West Side Story. It was a memorable evening, including pop music
highs, loneliness and estrangement, loss, and death, but its real triumph was
the artistic direction that created it. And under that direction, surely the
ADDA orchestra, via its superb playing and its inspired programmes, can already
claim to be at the pinnacle of achievement.