A dream of a concert: Tomas Brauner and Senja Rummukainen join ADDA Simfonica in Smetana, Prokofiev and Martinu

“Such stuff as dreams are made on, we are all spirits and are melted into air” are words that ought to remind us of the ephemeral, temporal nature of human life, that such good things must come to an end. Music lasts for the duration of the concert, but the memory lives on, especially the memory of this concert.

This idea of the dream of life must apply especially to one such as Bohuslav Martinu who suffered illness for much of his childhood. Infirmity found him viewing the world outside from the confines of a plain room at the top of a church tower. Such were the early years of the composer Martinu. Perhaps this is why his music seems continually seems to dream, seems to reach out for what might seem to be beyond reach, apparent, but just beyond experience.

Safranek in his biography of Martinu reminds us that the thematic germ of the first movement of his Fourth symphony, that theme which appears time and time again, is for the composer an expression of nature. Safranek also points out that this inspiration from the bucolic came to the composer in a dark apartment on 58th St. in New York City. The composer was in exile and had wandered for years. To wander is perhaps to wonder, to wonder what might have been, to dream.

Personally, I always find dreaming in the music of Martinu. I also always find surrealism, but not the nightmare vision of Dali or the riddles of Magritte. It’s more like Chagall mixed with Tanguy. Scenes appear at random, often unexpectedly juxtaposed for no particular reason, apparently randomly, or set against an infinite landscape that seems to disappear as soon as it is noticed. It is this dream-like world that seems to be a backdrop for Julietta and his other stage works and is created in abstraction throughout Martinu’s music. One of the strongest sensations of being taken to another world in music came for me personally during the sequence in act one of the opera when a driver falls asleep while in control of an express train. I even went to a second performance of the same production and the passage had the same effect, only more intensely.

The ADDA audience in Alicante was last night delivered such a dream. Martinu’s Fourth Symphony was played by ADDA’s resident orchestra under the baton of Tomas Brauner, the evening’s Czech guest. To say that Tomas Brauner understands Czech music would be an understatement, almost bordering on disrespect. Right from the tremolos at the start of the work, to the full tutti at the end, the ADDA audience was transported into a different world, a dream world as real as any reality, but rendered into an experience from which, frankly, it is hard to emerge. Not that one would want to wake from the bliss of such surely enduring memory. To say that this dream will live forever is no understatement, at least as far as this particular reviewer is concerned, until, of course, spirits melt into air. The complete and unashamedly joyous nature of this music surely seems to tell everyone to live the dream. It will cease soon enough, so enjoy it while you can, directly and without guilt.

Martinu brought many influences into his creative world. There is Czech folklore, popular culture, and jazz at least. Not to mention a touch of neo-classicism, whatever that might be. I hear Janacek as aural cubism, but not Martinu. His musical world is very much more joined up, more rational.  But the ecstatic is always within the composer’s reach, we feel, always within the composer’s thoughts. The music constantly grasps for a heaven on earth, but never quite grabs it. That seems to be the point. There is always that cadence that returns us to where we came from, but musically it rarely does. It always progresses, though it may sound like it returns to its starting place. Thus grounded, the next attempt to elevate is always there and always immediate.

Tomas Brauner’s reading of the score was quite simply perfect. The dynamics were stretched, the delivery was direct, despite the fact that the material was often ephemeral. This surely is Martinu’s style, his true voice, and Tomas Brauner communicated everything with remarkable energy, colour, imagination and flair.

And, for this particular fan of Czech music, how refreshing it was to have an all-Slav program. We started with Smetana’s Greatest Hit, The Moldau from Vltava. This is so well known it surely cannot surprise. But surprise it did: it surprises with every hearing because of the quality of the writing. Doubly surprising in this reading was the piece’s second section, when dance rhythms which I have previously hardly noticed were stressed and came to the fore. Here, they were pointed and sharp, where so often they are smoothed out, cut off from their roots.

Then we had a performance of Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante, Op. 125. Finnish cellist, Senja Rummukainen was soloist in what in another life would have been called a cello concerto.

In the review of ADDA’s last concert in the Pasiones season, I said the performance by cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras was unlikely to be bettered in a lifetime. Well, last night, just a few days later, Senja Rummukainen played so utterly perfectly that I have to challenge the permanence of last week’s opinion. But how can one compare late Schumann with late Prokofiev? The musical worlds are so completely different, they might even communicate in a different language.

Senja Rummukainen's playing throughout was complete perfection. Not only did she accomplish the technical feats, but the wit, unpredictability, occasional brutishness and lyrical invention of Prokofiev also shone. So what might a reviewer write about the second movement of the piece, which drew warm and amazed applause from an audience that normally waits religiously until the end? The gesture was utterly spontaneous and born of a mixture of admiration and emotional response. She played the Theme and Variations of Sibelius as an encore, a piece of lyricism, understatement, and control, the perfect foil to the opposites of Prokofiev that we had just heard.

The whole evening was finished off with one of the Dvorak Slavonic Dances. This time it was an upbeat celebration played at breakneck speed. The audience was thus left to pursue its own dreams. Dream on. The reality was pure dream, but the experience will surely last.

The Desconstruction of Mahler: ADDA under Josep Vicent with Patrick Messina in Adams, Brahms and Berio

This was a very special concert. It will live in the memory for as long as breath continues. It was nothing less than a triumph of artistic direction on behalf of Josep Vicent. All three featured works were, in their own way, quite recent, given the often-backward-looking character of concert programmes.

The evening began with a short, modern masterpiece. The program notes suggested that in our era, true myth (an oxymoron if ever there was one) is found not in characters of ancient Greek epics, but in the celebrities that populate our minds during waking hours. John Adams’s opera, Nixon in China, characteristically set recent events to music on a stage. Part of the opera’s point is that those figures involved in making history also have lives to live. John Adams cast Chairman Mao and his wife as dancers and the music to accompany this is The Chairman Dances, a Foxtrot for Orchestra.

It begins with a minimalist-sounding incessant rhythm, but in a moment of true magic, transforms itself into an almost sentimental dance, as if the celebrities forget themselves for a short time, and suddenly become human. Order does reassert itself as responsibilities and public faces re-emerge. The orchestral sound of this piece is vivid and multi-layered, but it does remind us continually that the clock rules rhythm, and perhaps our lives. It certainly rules the dance.

Second on the ADDA programme was Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata Opus 120. But this version was orchestral, the arrangement provided by Luciano Berio in 1986. Berio did not change Brahms’s original concept, but filled it out, so it occupied bigger space, even suggesting the concerto form. He was faithful to Brahms’s intention and this intimate, highly personal and lyrical work is now capable of filling a concert hall, though gently and in its original character. Patrick Messina as soloist gave a perfect (there is no other word) performance, totally controlled, completely in sympathy with the music. It was a performance with a humility that brought out the intentional understatement of the work. As an encore, we were treated to a more classical use of the clarinet with string accompaniment, again an arrangement.

The second half was given to a single work, a performance of Luciano Berrio’s Sinfonia for orchestra and amplified voices. The voices in question were London Voices, who seemed wholly at home with the highly multidimensional and unusual format of the piece.

Berio’s concept seems to grow spontaneously out of the experience of a twentieth century city. Charles Ives had at the start of the century chose impressionistic experience to portray the complexity of modern life. In his Sinfonia, Luciano Berio offered similar experience, but one on speed by comparison with that of Ives. An apparent jumble of sights, sounds, intellectual stimuli, musical references, passing comments and literary memories appear and combine to create a vivid, surreal collage, which deliberately does not hang together. It doesn’t because modern life is itself multidimensional, confused, confusing, stimulating, threatening and tender all at the same time. If I have one minor criticism, it is that the spoken text of the voices was not sufficiently prominent. Whether this matters is a matter of opinion. When visual art, for instance, features a raft of text, surely its effect is lost when viewers have to both read it and translate it. It may be the same with the words that Berio featured in this work. The word Majaskowsky did, however, hang in clean air. The text, by the way, is as collage-like as the music. It’s not a narrative, and is influenced by, amongst others, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Absurdity rules. This was thoroughly memorable music, and it was stunningly performed by the singers and musicians alike. 

In this performance, Josep Vicent chose to play this work in its original four movements. Berio did add a fifth, but I think the logic might have been to create space for the encores, which in their way added to the collage-like experience. Berio quotes extensively from Mahler in his Sinfonia. As an encore, this led to a performance of the Adagietto from the fifth symphony. After the apparent anarchy of the Berio, the long lines made a peaceful and beautiful contrast. Then, when we all thought the pastiche could not get richer, London Voices, with the accompaniment of a brushed drum, gave a fugue in a cappella jazz style with an upbeat rhythm. Let’s not try to explain. Let’s just listen.

Something special - Pablo González, Francesco Piemontesi and the Dresden Philharmonic in Beethoven and Strauss

Something special was experienced by the ADDA audience last night. On the face of it, the concert was almost conventional, as concerts sometimes can appear on paper. There was to be a Beethoven piano concerto followed by a Richard Strauss tone poem, it all sounded possibly a little run-of-the-mill. But don’t be fooled by appearances. This was undoubtedly something special.

Let’s start with Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto as interpreted by Francesco Piemontesi. As the program notes underlined, this work was Beethoven’s big break with the past, at least, as far as his concerto writing was concerned. This work was not to follow the eighteenth-century model of elegance before challenge. This third piano concerto of Beethoven has a really symphonic feel. The dialogue between the soloist and orchestra, contrasts strongly, here argumentative, here supportive.

And Francesco Piemontesi’s playing, brought out all the subtleties, without once resorting to gimmick or bravura. What was obvious from the opening orchestral passage to the work’s end was a sense of cooperation between the soloist and orchestra, a sense of communication and sharing, despite, on occasions, the music demanding, strong contrast. Francesco Piemontesi gave a brilliant performance, topped by a significant encore.

The orchestra was the Dresden Philharmonic, under the baton of Pablo González. Unusually Pablo González opened the second half with a short verbal presentation about Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. The work is clearly something special in the eyes of Pablo González. He described it as at least one of the greatest of all musical creations. And he stressed that this was not the Richard Strauss Don Quixote, although he went on to describe the piece as surreal and satirical, both of which might apply to the way a modern mind appreciates Cervantes’s novel.

And the performance was indeed something special. This is a piece that orchestras often play as if it were a gymnastics exercise. But here the romanticism and lyricism were stressed, and the music flowed rather than exploded. Here we had pauses to emphasize transitions, changes in dynamics that brought out all the textures in this multi-layered work. And we really did hear all the complexity of the aural colours that this great work projects.

As an encore, Luis Alonso got married again. This quintessence of popular Spanish music brought the house down.

 

Gustavo Gimeno and the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana in Sibelius and Mahler

Gustavo Gimeno conducted the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana in the latest concert of ADDA’s Pasions season. The program juxtaposed two symphonies that were premiered about thirty years apart by composers who were both born in the 1860s. The contrast, however, was immense.

Composed almost at the end of Jean Sibelius’s creative life, the Seventh Symphony is much more revolutionary than it might appear at first sight. Its compressed form is perhaps more reminiscent of a tone poem than a symphony, but at twenty minutes duration, its single movement is longer than many eighteenth century symphonies that advertise multiple sections. And here there is a sense of development, even evolution as motifs come and go, resurface and transform in this seemingly organic form. The whole takes on the feeling of a valediction, with the trombones effectively waving goodbye, hardly animated, but certainly determined, to a creative life that was soon to be retired.

Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony is a very moving work, full of wonderful, slow textures, where sounds seem to melt at the edges as they brush past one another. The Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana under Gustavo Gimeno’s direction, played the work sympathetically, always keen to bring these textures to the fore.

Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony, by contrast, came at the start of his composing career. Its gestation was protracted, and the composer revised the score almost each time it was played during its first five years.

The result, however, is an often-played masterpiece. Only two of Mahler’s symphonies, the first and fourth, are of half concert length, and the fourth needs a soloist. This makes the first symphony the easiest of the composer’s output to programme, and so one feels that its presence might sometimes be perfunctory. An orchestra wants Mahler on its curriculum vitae, and the first offers the least resistance.

But there was no such pragmatism on show for Gustavo Gimeno and the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, who had clearly rehearsed the piece at length. Here we had a reading and performance that stressed detail and contrast. Mahler’s juxtaposition of light and heavy, light and shade, loud and soft, fast and slow were perfectly communicated and played. But this was no mannerist display of the possible for possibility’s sake. Here all the lines were well drawn, and the overall shapes made sense, musically at least, which is often not the case with this intentionally episodic work.

It was so detailed that the musical allusions came to the fore. The funeral march’s juxtaposition of popular song alongside Jewish celebration was clear and also stark, and it seemed to be delivered with the wry smile that no doubt the composer wore while writing it. Also evident was the similarity at one point to the Fifth Symphony’s Adagietto. Also notable in the scherzo, just before the contrasting slow trio, there stood out of figure in the cellos, just a series of repeated notes, that were lifted verbatim by Shostakovich into his fourth symphony. No perfunctory presence for this symphony for that great composer.

Mahler’s rousing finale was delivered by standing brass and horns, but it was the whole orchestra that shone. Gustavo Gimeno was careful to present each section of the band for acclaim at the end. They had all deserved the applause.

 

Josep Vicent conducts Beethoven and Montsalvatge in Alicante

 

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is one of those works I can hear anytime I want. I play it to myself in my head - at least, I think I do. It's a work I and many others have heard so many times, I sometimes wonder what might be gained from hearing it again. On this occasion, I need not have worried.

This is always a concertgoer’s dilemma, at least, if you are a concertgoer like me, who always craves new and original experience. There are many concertgoers, perhaps even a majority, who want only to hear what they know, hence the rather repetitive and perhaps, at least to me, the rather stultified and predictable nature of a lot of programmes.

As a season-ticket holder, however, one does tend to go to whatever is billed, and on Sunday, 10 December 2023, Josep Vicent and the ADDA orchestra chose to play Beethoven Nine.

I tried to remember the last performance of the work I attended. It must have been that Promenade Concert over twenty years ago that I attended with an old college friend, when an original instrument group performed it. “It’s being sung on the original voices,” said my friend with more than a smile. We were a long way from the stage in London’s Albert Hall. The work, of course, filled the space. More often than not an overlooked but regularly visited friend is full of surprises when we do finally make contact.

And it was true with this performance of Beethoven Nine. There were even surprises in Josep Vicent’s reading. The opening bars, for instance, are so often played with the first violins cutting forte through the general tremolo. Here they were subdued, understated. In the last movement, when the famous theme establishes itself on wider strings after cellos and basses have introduced it, Vicent had the woodwind come almost to the fore with its argumentative counterpoint. Thirdly - and what a masterstroke! - the presence of the chorus on the stage meant the timpani had to move. Vicent brought it almost to the front of the stage alongside the violas and cellos. The timpani, of course, plays a thoroughly significant role in the work, and not only in the groundbreaking second movement, where it played melody for perhaps the first time. The four soloists, Erika Grimaldi, Teresa Iervolino, Airam Hernández and José Antonio, were all more than up to their tasks. Positioned just ahead of the chorus, they sang with remarkable clarity, volume and commitment.

But the real star of the show was the chorus, Orfeón Donostiarra. The chorus were not just committed to the task, they sang as if their lives depended on it. But they were always totally musical, never prone to stress volume rather than tone, always accurate, with every dynamic change respected. The amazing quality of their work was recognized by the audience’s loud cheers at the end, a gesture that was both noticed and appreciated by everyone present.

In the first half we had Montsalvatge’s Cant Espiritual de Joan Maragall, a twenty minute work for chorus and orchestra. Maragall’s words concentrate on the prospect of life after death, in contrast to Schiller’s which, as we know, are really interested in the here and now. Montsalvatge’s music, understated neoclassicism, mixed with modernism and popular song, came across as the perfect foil to the grandiloquence that was to follow. But in Beethoven’s case, the grandiloquence works every time. It’s grandiloquence with consequences and there’s not an empty second in the experience. In our current world, we need more, not less calls for brotherhood and sisterhood amongst all people.

 

Pimchas Zukerman plays Elgar with Orchestra National de Lyon under Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider in ADDA Alicante

When writing reviews, the pressure to express opinion often leads to overstatement. It is a position. I usually try to avoid, and I do so by concentrating on the positive aspects of the object under review. I will do the same here.

To say that everyone went away happy from this evening of Elgar and Brahms would be an understatement. They had been treated to an outstanding performance by an outstanding violinist. They had also been delivered a going-away lollipop in the form of the ever-popular Nimrod variation from Elgar’s Enigma to round off the evening.

Pinchas Zukerman is now seventy-five years old. He has been making music in public for over five decades of his life, and if anything, he seems to get better with time. There are few pyrotechnics to see in his playing. But when the eyes are closed, the true force of expression becomes clear in all of its colours.

The Elgar Violin Concerto that started this evening was beautifully played. Its complexity of argument, where orchestra and soloist seem regularly to exchange roles and material, seems like an intellectual process at times, an intellectual process that is conducted purely via emotion. This Elgar concerto is a thoroughly modern piece, dressed in nineteenth century form, as evidenced by the unconventional techniques the soloist is directed to use. Brahms, and indeed Mendelssohn are here, but so is the idea that violinist and orchestra combine and compete in dissecting a musical argument. This is no simple showpiece for a soloist to fill with emptiness.

And the communication between artist and orchestra this evening between Pinchas Zukerman and the Lyon Orchestra was superb. The soloist even joined in with the first violins here and there to keep himself busy. His tone throughout was a joy to hear, as was his obvious understanding of the problematic score. Elgar was always a showman, but his lack of personal confidence always persuaded him to be retiring. He considered himself an outside, an underdog who was always trying to gain entry to an establishment that he felt shunned him. It is rather strange, contradictory even, given that his music is now seen as thoroughly “establishment”. Personally I hear this dichotomy in the music, as exemplified so often at the start of his pieces, which sound is if we are entering into the middle of a conversation that was already underway before we arrived. It’s as if the composer is apologising before he has said anything!

After the interval, the Lyon Orchestra played the Symphony No. 1 of Brahms. It’s an orchestral standard, which, surely, most full-time professional orchestra have played many times, and can probably render convincingly from memory. It can be a challenge, not least for a member of the first violins who lost a string. She proceeded to play through the piece as if the problem did not exist. Remarkable and congratulations!

Personally, I don’t have much to say about the Brahms Symphony, except that if it had been written in the age of recording technology, Johannes Brahms would have been labelled a plagiarist. History, however, might mark the influence of Beethoven in his music as “inspiration”. It was an inspiration, as we know, that caused the composer, great difficulty, and perhaps this symphony had to be written to unleash creativity that otherwise would have found no voice. 

Another great ADDA evening.

Jesús Reina, Pierre Bleuse and ADDA Alicante in Ravel, Strauss and Mozart

For the third time this season, Alicante’s ADDA audience heard a major piece by Richard Strauss. The Violin Concerto is an early work, written when the young man was a teenager and still searching for a mature voice. As a consequence, it does remind one of Brahms, Mendelssohn here and there, amongst others.

But its overall conception is quite different. For a start, there is no obvious cadenza. Even at sixteen years of age, Richard Strauss was trying to write a concerto where soloist and orchestra were to combine to deliver an integrated musical experience. This was never conceived as a vehicle to allow a soloist merely to show off. And so it needs to be performed cooperatively, with the soloist always mindful of the orchestra’s contribution.

On this occasion, the soloist was Jesús Reina, a musician who devotes much of his time to playing chamber music in small ensembles. If anyone would be sympathetic to this need for integration, then, surely, he would be. The audience was not to be disappointed. He was so completely sympathetic to the orchestra’s role that he often turned during the time when he was not contributing to face the orchestra and actually listen to what they were playing. The result was a truly integrated work, with a musical argument coming to the fore. Pierre Bleuse’s direction also allowed the perfect balance to develop.

The concert had begun with the orchestral version of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. Now this work is often played almost as if it were conceived as an eighteenth-century concerto grosso, rather than an homage to the form from the point of view of a twentieth century composer.

This performance crafted by Pierre Bleuse was different. The shape was still there, but the hard, staccato edges seem to be softened. The strings seem to be offering commentaries rather than statements. The result was a beautifully balanced, surprising and thoroughly post-impressionist, twentieth century piece. It paid homage to the past while saying something quite new. It is such a familiar piece, but what a surprise!

Mozart’s G Minor Symphony occupied the second half of the concert. It is hard to find anything new to say about the work, but it is also a work that does not need novelty. It is so well crafted, so perfectly conceived, that it makes its own points every time it is played.

Pierre Bleuse’s direction brought out every aspect of Mozart’s score. It was serious, threatening, lyrical, playful, and always inventive. A real treat brought the evening to a close in the shape of Chabrier’s Habañera, a surprisingly subtle an interesting little piece. Another surprise!

Memorable? You bet! Joe Alessi plays Chick Corea’s trombone Concerto at ADDA, Alicante

The word memorable is much overused. It now tends to signify something that is rather bland, an experience unworthy of being labelled “world class”, “incredible”, “iconic” or some other meaningless malapropism. And if something is truly memorable, how long would we expect that memory to last? A minute? An hour? A lifetime?

Last night’s concert in ADDA, Alicante, was memorable. Its music alongside its experience will live in my own memory for the rest of my life. And it won’t be at the level of a distancing or fading recollection. This musical experience will forever be vivid, enhanced by Chick Corea’s wholly original score, and Joe Alessi’s skilled and committed playing.

Trombone concertos have been pretty thin on the ground until recent years. That is strange, because the instrument, also known as the sackbut, has been an orchestral feature for many centuries. In the past, of course, before the technological enhancements of the last two centuries, the instrument might have been used purely primarily for volume and had a reputation for clumsiness. A change of key might even need a different instrument. No more.

Chick Corea was a famous performer. His most familiar style was jazz, performing as a soloist or alongside the great names of the musical language. Chick Corea the bandleader and improviser we know from recordings, but Chick Corea the composer is less well-known. The trombone concerto that Joe Alessi commissioned from him turned out to be his last composition. Chick Corea apparently wanted to end the work quietly, but Joe Alessi plucked up the courage to ask him to change approach and up the excitement at the end. One would never have known there had been any change, so wonderfully did the work communicate its intentions.

What was so striking about the music was its apparently complete originality. Every phrase seemed to exist in a sound world new to the audience, to explore sonorities that even a concert goer with almost a lifetime of memories found not only surprising but striking. And these textures, generally, were delivered at a whisper, never a shout. Yes, there were jazz idioms, but there was also Charles Ives here (perhaps also walking around New York) and Copeland, amongst others. Presented as a stroll, followed by a couple of dances, punctuated by a little anguish, the music promised a relaxed meandering around tonal centres. But Chick Corea’s rhythms, let alone his harmonies, are rarely predictable. Rhythms break, and there are hooks sticking out that catch you as you pass. The listener is constantly lulled into assured familiarity only to be presented with sonorities and trips that keep the concentration fixed on where the next step might fall. The dances and the strolls therefore force you to notice everything, because it may trip you up.

Memorable it was. It’s a work and a performance that will live in the mind as long as I do, not least because of Joe Alessi’s wonderful performance. It was not just virtuoso. It was committed in a way that communicated his obvious and complete love of the piece. And the ADDA audience in its entirety shared the emotion and commitment of all of the performers, who, collectively, and Joel, Alessi in particular, made their work and our evening so utterly memorable.

Joe Alessi played what he described as a love song as an encore, perfect he said, for a daybreak stroll along Alicante’s waterfront. And then, buy popular request, we heard the coda from Chick Corea’s concerto a second time, its high note ending asking the soloist to work hard again. I am sure it was a labour of love.

The rest of the concert will live alongside the memories. Mussorgky’s Night on a Bare Mountain opened the evening. The unconventional music of Mussorgsky was revelatory, if not, always competent or coherent. The piece, however, is a complete success in its orchestral version. Not all visionaries of capable of perfection, as Repin’s portrait of the composer graphically illustrates. There is a lot going on.

And in the second half, we were presented with what promised to be the main event in the form of a performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet, alongside a film by Lukas van Woerkum, which offered a suitably silent, balletic re-interpretation of the fairytale. The effect was spectacular, but personally, I found that the visual sometimes caught me not listening to the music. As ever, the ADDA orchestra under Josep Vicent played faultlessly and the interpretation was nothing less than both faithful and spectacular. The film did make me listen to the piece in a different way. It was memorable effect, however, on a memorable evening.

Stefanie Irany, Josep Vicent and ADDA orchestra in Strauss, Berlioz and Tchaikovsky

Programa

Richard Strauss, Muerte y Transfiguración Op.24 23:00

Hector Berlioz, La muerte de Cleopatra 22:00

 I. C’en est donc fait! 03:00

 II. Ah! Qu’ils sont loin 07:00

 III. Méditation: Grand Pharaons 05:00

 IV. Non!...non, de vos demeures funèbres 03:00

V. Dieux du Nil 04:00

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sinfonía núm. 6 Op.74 46:00

I.                    Adagio -Allegro non troppo 18:00

II.                 II. Allegro con grazia 08:00

III.              III. Allegro molto vivace 09:00

IV.              IV. Finale: Adagio lamentoso 11:00

A new season brings an array of new faces. The composers and the works have figured before on programmes throughout the world. But one of the joys of music is that in performance it has the capacity to be different and fresher with each new hearing.

Personally, I cannot remember having heard The Death of Cleopatra in concert. I only recently became aware of the work via a broadcast recording. Now Berlioz is one of those composers who nearly always fails to impress me. The works come with a reputation for experiment, even overstatement, but too often I have found performances very much “of their time”. The fault, I now think, lay with the listener, who was always rather dismissive of this composer’s unique achievement. I realised my folly last night, sitting in the audience, as Stefanie Iranyi gave a spine-chilling performance of the work in front of Alicante’s ADDA Orchestra.

This music, so full of drama and expression, was also highly surprising. It turned unexpectedly, produced unfamiliar harmonies that seemed to communicate perfectly a sense of antiquity both beyond reach and understanding. It might have been because the ADDA audience was invited to participate in the story via projected text on the back of the stage. Line by line, the words appeared as they were sung, so we were able to share the drama and emotion of the piece more directly than if we had to read and follow the sound. Also, Stefanie Iranyi gave a thoroughly operatic performance which almost brought the ancient queen back to life.

Before the Berlioz, we had been treated to a performance of Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, a young man’s take on an imagined end of life. We were told in the programme that Strauss himself on his deathbed told onlookers that he had got it right all those years ago. Apocryphal or not, the young man’s take was ultimately positive, since the apotheosis of the piece is to find peace. Whether that peace was eternal or blissful, or just piecemeal, we will see. I am always impressed at the range and depth of sound that Richard Strauss could get from and orchestra.

And so to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, The Pathetique. I suppose there was a macabre thread running through the programme – death, death and death - but in Tchaikovsky’s case, the jury is still out as to whether the work is some form of suicide note.

It is a work that simply grows and grows. The more exposure to this symphony one has, at least in the concert hall, the better it gets. This is a work of profound intellect, great emotion and wondrous technique, both with the orchestra and with the structure of the piece. Personally, I could not care if Tchaikovsky did not follow the precise rigours of sonata form. By the 1890s he had clearly transcended such things. He had already become the kind of individual voice that would populate the twentieth century. It is just a pity that he never made it that far and more of a pity that the society that surrounded him had attitudes that were backward looking. And has anyone ever written an emotional leap like the one that happens between the last bars of the third movement and the opening of the fourth?

And what about the end of the work, with that repeated motif in the double basses? Did not Shostakovich use the same idea – even almost he same music! – at the end of the infamous fourth? It would be stupid to suggest that some music might be ahead of its time.

We got rhythm – Josep Vicent and the ADDA orchestra in Ravel, Adams and Reveueltas

Concert programs nowadays are often themed. Sometimes the idea is obvious, sometimes trite, but even attempting to present such a program is preferable to a parade of pop classics. Sometimes real imagination has gone into the selected words, and the link may not be obvious. Whether or not the works chosen by Josep Vicent in last night’s ADDA concert in Alicante were consciously selected to illustrate a theme of the rhythm of popular dance, as transformed by composers who did not take instructions literally, is irrelevant. But that was the theme that came across to this captivated listener.

The evening potentially was a challenge for those concertgoers who live mainly in the repertoire already known to them, but no one attending this concert went away in any way challenged. Indeed, everyone left enlightened by the experience.

The ADDA orchestra opened with Ravel’s La Valse. Now this is a regularly misunderstood work, not least originally by those who commissioned it! It still suggests a dance, which is what it is. And yet, it isn’t. It might start like a dance, but it ends like a nightmare. It’s a waltz dreamed up by a composer at the height of his imaginative powers, and it is a thoroughly surreal work, not at all what it might seem at first hearing. In fact, this is one of those works that seems to change with repeated listening. First impressions retain the sweet theme. Later familiarity stresses the dissonant clashes.

Using a large and powerfully scored orchestra, a gentle dance theme transforms into a war-like threat, literally a nightmare of oppression, all delivered with a smile as the dagger goes in. If I have a criticism, which I don’t, I might suggest the work’s power is best delivered by not interpreting each phrase manneristically. When the line of the waltz predominates, the side-roads of the musical argument, the diversions that give the piece meaning, are rendered all the more powerful. In this performance, Josep Vicent chose to stress every phrase, almost to isolate it. And beautiful it was, certainly exciting, but the whole experience possibly suffered because the side-roads became the main route. The orchestral playing by our resident ADDA orchestra, as ever, was breath-taking.

And then we heard Absolute Jest by John Adams with the Casals Quartet as soloists. This is a work where John Adams takes well-known Beethoven and reinterprets it by interleaving it with his own material, ostensibly to re-create childhood experiences of his hearing the late quartets of Beethoven so often.

Now it must be remembered the Beethoven regularly used dance rhythm in his work. Like Ravel in La Valse, he often stretched these rhythms into musically interesting but absurd forms. And in Absolute Jest this double take adopts a third layer as John Adams interleaves his own material that both contrasts with and complements the original. The effect is utterly surreal. It’s like encountering the familiar in a place you have never visited. As in La Valse, these are not familiar phrases in a changed context, they are memories of the familiar where almost nothing makes sense, as in a dream. Apart, that is, from the rhythm, which, like a home key for Haydn, keeps reasserting itself and thus keeping the strangeness of the experience at home, rendering the whole doubly surprising.

As an encore, the Casals Quartet played the second movement of Beethoven’s Op135. It is a piece that Absolute Jest featured prominently amongst its quoted material. Standalone, it’s a piece that reminds an audience of just how revolutionary a composer Beethoven was. It is a piece that hardly exists. What is the theme? What is the harmony? All four players, like characters in Chekhov, seem to play only the subtext of a plot, and yet it comes together because insistent rhythms create lines. It is perhaps the most intangible thing Beethoven wrote.

And then, in the second half, we heard a real rarity. Silvestre Revueltas wrote film music for The Night of the Mayas. Paul Hindemith presented some of the music as a suite, and then José Ives-Limantour reassembled the material to form what might be seen as of four movement symphony. Using popular dance rhythms and re-imagined pre-Columbian sounds, Revueltas produced music as surreal is the Ravel that began the concert. The difference for a European audience was that the waltz form was familiar, but the dance forms and rhythms in the Revueltas were not. Here Mayan dances are presented and convince musically, despite the fact that neither the composer, nor perhaps anyone else, knew what they had sounded like. It is possibly patronising to say that, however, because Mayan culture is still very much alive!  

Convincing, however, it was. Extended passages where the percussion stood alone with only minimal commentary from the orchestra were perhaps the most memorable, simply because they were so different from what had gone before. And always we had the rhythm, that essential quality to which to evening had seemed to be dedicated.

As an encore, Josep Vicent and the ADDA orchestra offered the final part of Ravel’s Bolero. Another popular form, another rhythm, a three in a bar complicated by a composer who knew how to stretch the imagination! Another surreal image wrapped in incessant rhythm. Brilliant.

The familiar seen and heard anew – Ivan Fischer, Francesco Piemontesi and the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Schumann, Dohnanyi and Strauss

 

Some time ago, Hillary Hahn played the Sibelius Violin Concerto in Alicante’s ADDA hall in a way that I described as utterly new. Though I had heard the work many times, at least hundreds, this performance opened my eyes anew to its qualities, many of which I had clearly hitherto missed. The same quality of experience applied to Francesco Piemontesi’s interpretation last night of the Schumann Piano Concerto.

It’s a work I have perhaps heard not just hundreds, but thousands of times. Frankly, I don’t have much time for Robert Schumann for reasons I won’t go into. Let’s just say that I tend to tolerate his music’s presence on concert programs without really seeing the point. I tend to find his music over-planned, too self-conscious, perhaps over-eager to present a facade. I admit that he may not be the only artist at fault in such areas!

After Francesco Piemontesi’s performance of the Piano Concerto, however, I feel I may have just been missing the point over the years, or perhaps it might be that the norm in performance is to splash the canvas of interpretation too liberally with respect and too little with humanity. In the hands of Francesco Piemontesi, there was hardly a phrase of this piece that was not “interpreted”. Now sometimes that’s a euphemism for “over-played” or “over-done”. In this case, it meant the use of subtle dynamics, changes of pace, nuances of touch, all designed to bring the music to life. The overall effect was to render the solo part conversational, even personal. I doubt there was a member of the audience who did not feel that this was a personal occasion, shared only by themselves and the soloist. The sense of communication was all-pervading, with the orchestra and soloist never in conflict, always cooperating to create musical sense. And what orchestra playing it was!

Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra seemed to weave in and out of the textures of the piano, never conflicting, never competing and never overwhelming. And so, by the end, I felt literally as if I had heard the work for the first time, so different was the experience from my expectation.

The Budapest Festival Orchestra under Ivan Fischer began the concert with a performance of Dohnanyi’s Symphonic Minutes. Though less of an innovator than Bartok and perhaps less melodious than Kodaly, Dohnanyi shares the same heritage and his music, witty, sumptuous and yet also neo-classical deserves to be played more.

The second half of Richard Strauss presented a pair of tone poems, Don Juan and Till Eugenspiegel sandwiching The Dance of the Seven Veils from Salome. These two tone poems demand superb orchestral playing and coordination, and right from the opening bars of Don Juan, it was obvious that the Budapest Festival Orchestra both relished and warmed to the task. The result was stunningly vivid, spectacular and exhilarating. Salome’s dance was colourful and deliberately graphic. Then came a masterstroke.

At the start of the evening it was noticeable that Ivan Fischer had placed the basses at the back of the orchestra. This seem to create a balanced, even orchestral texture, through which detail was only enhanced. For Till Eulenspiegel, Ivan Fisher moved the horn section to the front to sit like a quartet of soloists around the podium. The effect was to amplify Till’s pranks, enhance the story and render the performance ultra-vivid, almost surreal.

An encore also broke the mould. Instead of an orchestral lollipop, three members of the Budapest Festival Orchestra played a piece of traditional Hungarian peasant string band music. Here were the quarter tones and strange harmonies of the type that Bartok, Kodaly, Dohnanyi and others had tried to record, in their estimation before they disappeared. Here they were alive, well and rapturously received. It really was an evening of surprises.

A triumph of programming - ADDA Symfonica with Ivan Martin under Yaron Traub play unfamiliar Scriabin and Tchaikovsky

Much thought nowadays is devoted to the construction of concert programmes. A mass audience, almost by definition, is dictatorial. The old favourites are always safe, and the need for posteriors on bucket seats often demands repetition of the hackneyed, the overplayed lollipops of popular taste. But there is also another side to programming these days, an approach that explores the repertoire and, at least, for part of the concert, challenges an audience to listen without expectation, or pre-judgment. Usually this is done by including a contemporary piece alongside a cobwebbed standard. Sometimes, as in last night’s concert in Alicante’s ADDA auditorium, it is achieved by exploring the lesser known, less played works of well-known names. It is rare, however, for a whole concert to be devoted to such less well-known early works.

In an all-Russian program, the ADDA orchestra under Yaron Traub played two works, written just three decades apart in the nineteenth century, Scriabin’s Piano Concerto from the 1890s and Tchaikovsky Symphony No.1, Winter Daydreams, from the 1860s. The truly inspired element of the programming was the shared significance of both these works in the careers of their creators.

Both works are seen as early works, written before the development of the composer’s mature style. In the case of Scriabin, of course, we could discuss precisely what that might have been at some length. Both works have become labelled as breakthrough works, in both cases the creator’s first orchestral success - again in Scriabin’s case this might be debatable! But together, they offer an audience a terrific insight into how these creative minds developed by locating, essentially, where they started from.

Scriabin’s Piano Concerto was written to show off his own virtuosity. It does sound rather like Chopin, even conservative in outlook, given that this style was already half a century old by the 1890s. The composer scored the piano to play close to continuously throughout piece, and there are a couple of places where the orchestra drowns the soloist, but then he would do that later in Prometheus, wouldn’t he? And here there’s no real cadenza, no real opportunity for the soloist to take centre stage, which is strange, given the composer’s self-serving motivation. Orchestration, at this point in Scriabin’s career, was clearly not a strong point, but the integration of soloist and orchestra in the work was its forward-looking aspect. Ivan Martin’s performance was beyond perfect and it was his contrasting encore of baroque trilling.

Winter Daydreams, the Symphony No1, was Tchaikovsky’s breakthrough work. Unlike Scriabin, at the same age, Tchaikovsky showed in this early work much that would become his mature style. There is even a passage for horns in this work which sounds like it came straight out of Nutcracker. And again, unlike Scriabin, Tchaikovsky’s regular use of long lines of theme give this work almost the feel of a novel with a linear plot. All the strong contrasts and outbursts, which were later to characterize his writing, are here already formed, part of the composer’s language.

It is a great program that can surprise through assumed, but misunderstood familiarity.

Surprise, surprise - ADDA with Christian Lindberg and Roland Pontinen

Concert programmes can often appear rather conventional at first sight. A well-known Romantic symphony in the second half, preceded by an equally well-known piano concerto, and, to start, a nod towards the contemporary. It all seems like it might be predictable, even though the first work might be a world premiere. But live music is never predictable. More often, it is surprising, and this concert was one of those, but the surprise itself was surprising.

The world premiere in this concert was Macabre Dances by Jan Sandstrom. The program notes explained that after the composer had suffered a stroke, he experienced a series of strange visions and dreams, apparently caused by his condition. This these gave titles to the movements, Horses in the sea, Stolen signature, Suburb in the east, Crawl in the Mona Lisa, and, finally, Finally. Throughout, there was a sense that the music was familiar, but it was accompanied by, overlaid with, stretched between or compressed within other unique and different elements in the way that made the entire experience unfamiliar, even strange. It was like seeing something you know well, and then realising that you don’t, in fact, know it at all. But the effect was not surreal: on the contrary, given the composer’s own program note, the work vividly portrayed the perceptual experience of a physical condition that none of us wants to have. The Mona Lisa movement was even given an encore at the end of the concert and, even on second hearing, its strangeness proved enduring. Its musical worth was only enhanced.

Roland Pontinen was soloist in the Liszt Piano Concerto No.1. Now this is a work that is both succinct and expansive. It’s succinct because it’s all over in under twenty minutes. It’s expansive because of the way musical ideas are shared across the solo part and the orchestra. The model, until then, had very much been rather formulaic, an opportunity for the soloist to show off with an accompaniment from a larger sound. But this concerto tried to create a tone poem where the soloist and the orchestra truly shared material. Guest conductor of the ADDA orchestra, Christian Lindberg, ensured that the elements all hung together. Roland Pontinen’s encore was a Chopin mazurka, a quiet, unspectacular way to underline his control and virtuosity. The ADDA audience listened with great intensity.

And then, surprisingly, there was a second encore of a quite different character. It may have been a set piece, but its comedy was born of musical virtuosity, and the audience lapped it up. Roland Pontinen and Christian Lindberg offered a Hungarian Dance of Brahms arranged, if that be the word, for piano and trombone. It was a farce, and all the jokes came off.

In the second half, this particular listener experienced an even greater surprise. Schumann’s fourth symphony, at least in the usual numbering, is a familiar work, whose twists and turns I thought were completely familiar. I was wrong. Played almost without a pause between the movements, the piece and phrasing told a linear, novel-like story. This surely was musical interpretation of the highest standard, and it is Christian Lindberg who takes the credit for the direction, but it was also the wonderful ADDA orchestra that performed perfectly.

Scriabin’s Divine Poem and Manuel de Falla played by Judith Jauregui is a revelation

Josep Vicent, artistic director, and conductor at ADDA, Alicante, decided to entitle the whole season of concerts ‘Divine Poem’. One must conclude that he really wanted to build this particular work into the orchestra’s repertoire. In last night’s concert, he and the ADDA Orchestra played the Divine Poem, effectively the Symphony No. 3 of Alexander Scriabin and it proved to be nothing less than a triumph.

This is very much a transitional work, or so we are told. Scriabin’s early work was heavily influenced by Chopin and Liszt. Then he discovered Wagner and other extra-musical influences, including Indian mythology, pantheism and the stimulus provided by an ego the size of a universe, and so his style changed, as we are told. The expressive, apparently unpredictable and vivid symbolism of the late piano sonatas seems not to relate to the early works, but a keen listener will, however, find progression, not change.

The Poem of Ecstasy and the Poem of Fire, orchestral works that followed the Divine Poem, were single movement pieces, more like the tone poems than symphonies. The Poem of Fire reflected the composer’s increasing tendency towards the grandiose in that it involves a large orchestra, a piano soloist, a full chorus, an organ, and, if it is done as the composer wished, an auditorium-wide light show and perfumes wafted in using wind machines. Personally, I have attended one such a performance, in London’s Royal Albert Hall in the 1970s. The program notes made Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye.

The projected work to follow these, a work that the composer promised to write but only had time to sketch was his Mysterium, a giant ego-trip in three movements that would have involved building a new concert hall in the Himalayas and mounting a week-long festival whose finale, so the composer thought, would be the end of the world. Death at forty-three from blood-poisoning prevented Alexander Scriabin from completing the project.

In 1972, the year of the centenary of Scriabin’s birth, his music was for a while in the spotlight. I bought John Ogden’s Sonata cycle, a disc of the two late poems and Svetlanov’s Melodiya, recording of the Divine Poem. I now have at least one recording of every work the composer wrote. But the Svetlanov Divine Poem is the only recording I have of this work. It’s not played very often.

Which is a surprise, because on the face of it, it’s a conventional symphony. It sounds like Rachmaninov in places and is very much in a nineteenth century idiom. It’s not as challenging at first hearing as a Mahler symphony, or a Strauss tone poem, for that matter. It’s quite melodic and reaches some amazing dynamic heights. It is certainly memorable.

But on this hearing, I found much more in the Divine Poem, a work I have been listening to for fifty years. Embedded in the second and third movements of the three movement  symphony are all the musical elements, the themes, the harmonies, and the orchestral juxtapositions, that would reappear in Ecstasy and Fire. They are all there! It became nothing less than revelatory to realize that there is nothing new in those later, often described as revolutionary works. It’s all there in the Divine Poem.

Josep Vicent’s reading of the score was, as ever, superb. The rich textures of Scriabin’s orchestration were all interpreted and played to perfection, and one thinks that the trombones and tuba have never worked so hard for a living! The performance was a total success, and I await the other works’ inclusion in future programs. ADDA’s habit of projecting images onto the back of the stage would work well for the Poem of Fire. The orchestra’s encore of the Prelude to act three of Lohengrin was an informed choice, since various passages in the Divine Poem clearly owed much to Wagner, not least the birdsong section in the first movement, we seemed to have flown in directly from Siegfried.

The Divine Poem came after a first half of music by Manuel de Falla. We began the evening with the Jota from El Sombrero de Tres Picos, and then we heard a stunningly beautiful performance of Noches en los Jardines de España, Nights In The Gardens Of Spain with Judith Juregui a soloist. Some of Manuel de Falla’s orchestral textures in the third movement were distinctly Scriabin-esque. Judith Jauregui’s playing of this work, which is a piano concerto in all but name, was exquisite and her encore of music by Mompou was an inspired choice.

Josep Vicent and ADDA keep on presenting concerts which transcend my abilities to write reviews. They are nothing less than memorable, every time!

Musical perfection - the Bamberger Symphoniker, Jakub Hrusa, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Many years ago, when I was a student, I, along with many others, bought a new stereo system and we regularly listened to chosen LPs to assess the relative merit of the purchases. One of the disks was Istvan Kertesz’s Dvorak Symphony No.8 on Decca. The recording and playing were both crisp, sure, and sonorous. The entries were decisive, the interpretations subtle, and the dynamics generous. Until last night, I thought I had heard the definitive interpretation of this familiar, but never disappointing, work.

The last night in question was a performance by the Bamberger Symphoniker under Jakub Hrusa who, for me, arrived with a certain reputation to prove. What was it about this conductor that now seems to have the world of classical music at his feet? Well, the list proved to be long - and included precision, dedication, vision, cooperation, and, above all, a sheer delight in music. I began with a question and by the end of the evening it, along with many others had been definitively answered.

This performance of Dvorak’s eighth symphony was more than memorable. The pianos were piano, and the fortes were forte. These are platitudes, perhaps, but nonetheless often and crucially such elements can be smoothed out to a generalized shape which hides the music’s detail, especially in a piece so well-known and as often played as this. Jakub Hrusa, from the very first notes of Beethoven’s Leonora overture number three that started the concert, was clearly someone who wanted to shape the sound, to make sense of the musical argument. It is this vision of the work’s shape and construction that makes the listeners’ experience complete. I cannot remember a performance of this Beethoven overture where the transitions were quite so clear and contrasted, where the dynamic changes added to the musical experience rather than merely punctuated it. And equally, it was the same with the Dvorak Symphony. The attention to detail, the continual consideration of the question of what the composer was trying to say produced a performance that was utterly memorable.

And so to the central work in the program. I like to save the best to the last. Igor Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto uses no bombast at its surface and its employees little which is merely an opportunity for the soloist to show off. But at the heart of the piece is a dialogue. often humorous, between the soloist and selected bands from within the orchestra, which itself behaves differently from a conventional concerto accompaniment. Stravinsky always concentrates and contrasts sonorities, grouping instruments into surprising combinations of timbre and harmony. The work progresses as a dialogue between the storytelling solo part, amid interjections and comments from the orchestra.

To work as music that communicates, this piece needs a soloist who can overcome the technical challenges with ease, whilst at the same time, maintaining a conversation with the different orchestral elements. Patricia Kopatchinskaja was not only able to do this, but also to raise the performance to a perfected artwork. One was not conscious of ‘soloist and orchestra’, one felt only that one had entered a music world, understood it’s highly personal language and shared its vision and thus become a partner in the experience, not a mere onlooker.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s performance of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto was one of the most memorable musical events. I can recall in over fifty years of concert-going. The playing was perfect, but that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t the virtuosic performance that made the difference. Such adjectives simply don’t apply when an experience is so completely absorbing that all you hear is the communication and the message, not just the voice that tells the story. Music, after all, can say things in ways that words can’t. That is why we listen to it. And I will be listening to this performance in my memory for the rest of my life, and happily so.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja made the point that much of Stravinsky’s music in the concerto takes the form of chamber music. And, as an encore, she unusually presented more chamber music in the shape of part of the violin and cello duo of Ravel, the Bamberger’s principal cello playing the second part. Like the Stravinsky, this work was full of humour and contrast, but here, Ravel also delved into the surreal. Music is a language, and the Bamberger orchestra, Jakub Hrusa, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja were simply its voice.