Helsinki Philharmonic under Saraste play a Sibelius programme

 

Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducted the Helsinki Philharmonic orchestra in a program devoted to the music of Sibelius. Now a Finnish conductor with a Finnish orchestra playing Finnish music might sound like it could turn out to be a cliché. But these people know precisely what they are doing with their national composer. Clearly, the Helsinki Orchestra plays a lot of Sibelius, but they also clearly never tire of the task.

The concert started with a work not published in the program. The previous concert had been cancelled in the aftermath of the devastating floods that had hit the Valencian region. As a mark of respect for those who have suffered, the orchestra opened with the Valse Triste of Sibelius. It was a gesture appreciated by the audience.

The first half of the concert then got underway with Jan Söderblom, the Helsinki Philharmonic leader playing the First Serenade for violin and orchestra, Opus 69a. This is a thoroughly understated work. The Second Serenade, more substantial and more musically interesting came third on the program with Jan Söderblom again as soloist.

In between, the orchestra’s principal flute, Niamh McKenna, was soloist in the Nocturne No.3 from Sibelius’s incidental music to Belshazzar’s Feast. So it was with these three short pieces, featuring solo violin, flute, and then violin again that the concert started. If I have a criticism, which I accept is the level of nitpicking, I would suggest that these three pieces should have been presented with the flute first or last, allowing the two serenades to be played back-to-back. It was in this form that the Helsinki orchestra premiered in 1915, a concert which also featured the original version of the fifth symphony.

The performance of Finlandia that followed saw several extra musicians take to the stage and the familiar cords did ring out. Finlandia is a thoroughly moving experience and no matter how many times it is played, it always has a rousing effect on an audience. This was no exception.

The second half was taken with a performance of the Fifth Symphony, though in its revised version, not the original of 1915, which is never now played. And the fifth is perhaps the composer’s most popular work, alongside the Violin Concerto. With such a well-known work, it would be easy to fall into the trap of mouthing platitudes, but this performance was anything but that. The music was fresh, as fresh as Sibelius himself would have wanted when he said that whereas modern composers were offering up cocktails, he only wanted fresh spring water. The music was both clear and refreshing.

There was also an encore, the Alla Marcha from the Karelia, which needed even more musicians on stage

Shunta Morimoto plays in Denia, 7 November 2024, 8pm, Teatro Centro Social

 

The Philharmonia with Suzuki and Queyras in Schumann and Dvorak - another case of "no superlatives"

Some time ago, for a review of the concert in Alicante’s ADDA auditorium, I used the headline “No superlatives”. I chose the words not because I wanted to question the quality of the experience, but quite the opposite. The concept of “superlative” was itself transcended by the quality of the music and performance in that concert. Indeed, a superlative only makes sense when a comparison is to be made. But to what can we compare perfection? Last night the ADDA audience experienced another “No superlatives” concert. Perhaps I am reverting to my north of England Yorkshire stereotype where the judgment “I couldn't fault it” represents the highest possible praise.

The concert in question was delivered by superstars. Jean-Guihen Queyras was the cello soloist and Masaaki Suzuki conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra. I lived in London for twenty years and the Philharmonia, known then paradoxically those years ago as the New Philharmonia, was always my personal orchestra of choice whenever I scanned the monthly South Bank agenda. Last night, the richness and dynamics of the orchestral sound were stunning, as was the orchestra’s control of rhythm and phrasing, so important in the evening’s principal work, Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony.

If the orchestra noticeably excelled, then Masaaki Suzuki was surprisingly anonymous. There can be no greater compliment to a conductor to admit that you really did not notice him or her. Masaaki Suzuki appeared to let the music flow naturally, seamlessly, to such an extent that at times he seemed superfluous. We might all aspire to such transparency, but achieving it demands true artistry, true and supreme ability. When, to accompany an encore, Masaaki Suzuki return to the platform to conduct a lyrical Slavonic Dance by Dvorak carrying a triangle, which he threatened to play. Only then did the attention focus on him and him alone. He used the instrument almost as a tease, still allowing the dulcet tones of Dvorak’s melody to shine.

In the first half we had heard Jean-Guihen Queyras play the Robert Schumann Cello Concerto. Specifically here, superlatives do not apply. Neither can the label “virtuoso” be attached to the performance, whose quality was way beyond such words. The three movements are played without a break and the composer’s imagination was clearly running wild at the time. Personally, I often find Schumann’s music rather impenetrable, but not in this performance.

As an encore Jean-Guihen Queyras played the Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4, preceded by a short Ukrainian melody. The music had a life of its own thanks to these amazing performances. Again, no superlatives.

Fumiaki Miura, Josep vicent and ADDA Simfonica in Ravel and Shostakovich

This was a concert of two halves, both superb, both contrasted, both within and between. Shostakovich in the first half and Ravel in the second provided the between contrast between. The works chosen, two by each composer, provided the contrast within.  To the second half first.

Ravel’s Daphne and Chloe Suite No2 is a concert hall favourite. It is a post-impressionist splash of colour, like Matisse cutouts dancing around their own space. But it’s also symphonic: it feels like the colours develop and transform, though strangely they do not seem to merge, except in the opening sunrise. Josep Vicent used two locations for the wordless chorus, one group, at the rear right of the stage as the audience saw it, and the second in a box, higher and further to the right, above the stalls. The effect was akin to surround sound. The orchestral playing in this work, and the one that followed was outstanding, with all the timbre and textures of the music glowing in their own right.

Ravel’s Bolero has been described as the music of madman. Ravel’s own assessment of the opinion was that it was correct. The work is so well known that I will say nothing about the music itself, except to point out one aspect which Josep Vicent chose to stress. The drum rhythms are usually insistent and ever-present in this piece. There are performances where the audience hears very little else. But this was not one of them. Josep Vicent had the drum’s contribution in dynamic balance with the rest of the instruments. At the start, the drum was barely audible above the pizzicato strings. As a result, the superb orchestral playing was able to communicate all the textures the composer chose to exploit, and these became the focus. That magical passage where a horn and celeste play together sparkled like Christmas lights. We even got an encore of the final sections, just in case we had missed it first time round.

In the first half, the ADDA audience heard two works by Shostakovich. The Jazz Suite No1 was played by an ensemble including saxophones, trumpets, trombone, violin, bass, various percussion, an upright piano, a banjo, and a slide guitar. As always with the music of Shostakovich, the listener is never quite sure whether to take anything seriously. He always seems to be looking over his shoulder to judge reaction, except, of course, when the subject with himself, when he wallows in DSCH, as in the Eighth Quartet or the Tenth Symphony. The personal signature motif, however, seemed to be lacking from both the Jazz Suite and what followed. The textures and witticisms of this music came across vividly, as did its inherent self-doubt mixed with tragic whimsy. It was, after all, Shostakovich.

The piece that ended the first half of the concert was something completely different from the rest of the evening. This was Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No2 with Fumiaki Miura as soloist. This particular concerto is not played often and dates from thirty years after the rest of the programme. Like much late Shostakovich, such as the Viola Sonata, quartets and symphonies, it seems almost distracted. This is music made of lines that don’t seem able to decide where to go, never mind join up. It’s an unsettling experience, full of questions that are not even finished, let alone answered. Unlike the other works in the program, however, this second violin concerto by Shostakovich does invite further listening. The almost chamber music feel of the orchestration, where particular sounds stand out unexpectedly, is surely part of what the composer was trying to achieve. And what would you make of the interjections from a tom-tom that seem to interrupt and threaten? The solo part often seems to be screaming, but quietly, almost trying to hide its nervous agitation.

All of this complexity was perfectly interpreted and conveyed by Fumiaki Miura, the soloist for this performance. It’s not performed as much as other concertos, so Fumiaki Miura understandably chose to have a score in sight. But his interpretation of this narcissistic, self-conscious, self-referential. perhaps self-mocking music was as close to perfect as I could imagine. And that drum? Is it fate knocking on the door, or the police? Or is it Shostakovich waking up the audience?

Despite all the brilliance of Daphnis and Chloe, the firework show of Bolero and the witticisms of the Jazz Suite, it is Fumiaki Miura’s playing of this enigmatically understated work that will last in the memory. And, just to add to the surrealism, he played the Vieuxtemps Variations on Yankee Doodle Dandy as an encore. Memorable.

Orchestra of the Royal Capital City of Krakow under Katarzyna Tomala-Jedynak in ADDA Alicante

Surprises come when least expected. On entering the ADDA auditorium, it was at least a shock to see so little of the stage occupied. So used have we become to seeing a platform crammed with seats and percussion hardware in preparation for a “big” work that the apparently scattered chairs and stands that awaited the arrival of a moderately size string orchestra was at least startling. And there was to be only one double bass!

Providing a perfect example of the phrase “less can be more”, the orchestra of the Royal Capital City of Krakow proceeded with a program that surprised and delighted the audience almost with every note.

We began with the Sinfonietta Number Three of Penderecki, a reworking for string orchestra of his String Quartet No. 3, subtitled “Pages from an unwritten diary”. The composer’s style, outside of his religious works, tends towards the episodic. Seemingly simple ideas come and go, and via abrupt transitions and apparent non-sequiturs, we are led around an idea that reworks itself, perhaps without reaching even musical finality, let alone a position of argument or comment. Celebrating Penderecki's 90th anniversary, this piece’s subtitle was apposite. What might have been written if this diary had been complete? The Sinfonietta Number Three is thus an example of what might have been, its apparent raw edges deliberately left unsmoothed.

There followed a performance of a thoroughly different kind of work. The Concerto for String Orchestra by Grazina Bacewicz is a masterpiece. She uses the string orchestra in a largely neo- classical manner, in a way that seems to alternate between the concerto grosso and sonata form. But there are also harmonies here that come from popular music, and all this is encased in a rhythmic drive that never lets the piece flag in its apparently relentless progress. It is succinct, tightly argued, and makes perfect sense in a surreal, unexpected way. Clearly, this is a piece that the orchestra plays often, and they clearly enjoy it every time.

The real surprise came after the interval with Mendelssohn’s Ninth String Symphony. The product of a mature mind aged about twelve, the piece is an astounding achievement. It is tightly structured and musically convincing. The surprise comes in the slow movement, which Katarzyna Tomala-Jedynak did not try to conduct.

Using just eight players, the movement begins with four violins in counterpoint. There follows a balancing section of two violas, cello and bass, before a conclusion, where the four violins are joined by the others in an octet. Treating this as chamber music and leaving the decisions to the players emphasized the whole program’s closeness to the chamber music experience. By the end, the communication that this engendered between performers and audience more than compensated for the lack of volume. The orchestra of the Royal Capital City of Krakow offered a short, but energetics dance movement as an encore.

Surprise, surprise – Bergmann and Baldeyrou play Sibelius, Weber and Franck in ADDA, Alicante

Surprise, surprise might seem an incongruous title for the review of a concert which seemed to offer a-middle-of-the-road programme. Sibelius’s Finlandia began the evening – it often does. Call Maria von Weber’s Clarinet Concerto is not played in concert as much as it should be, but its inclusion raises no eyebrows. César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, again, is not played very often, but it’s a work that everyone knows about, though for most concert goers it's hardly commonplace. So, given the familiar appearance of the program, what was surprising?

Well, the personnel were unfamiliar. We had our regular band, our ADDA orchestra, but our guest conductor was the Norwegian Pune Bergmann, who was making his debut in this hall. His entrance provided the evening’s first surprise. Rune Bergmann is a big man, but he is also quite amazingly jovial, his smile appearing to stretch right across the string section. It seemed like the celebration of Finland’s identity was being directed by a laughing, Norwegian mountain, laughing out of the sheer joy of the music, I hasten to add. Musically there were no surprises here, just our usual quality.

The second surprise came with our soloist, Nicolas Baldeyrou. Few concert goers ever hear a clarinet concerto. For most who do, it’s probably one written by Mozart, with Weber’s work coming a distant second in the list.

Now Weber’s Clarinet Concerto was doubly surprising. First the playing of Nicolas Baldeyrou was nothing less than outstanding. His understanding of the music alongside his wonderful communication with conductor and orchestra made this performance of the work I have heard in recordings and broadcasts innumerable times something completely new. Especially surprising was the slow movement, which times reached pianissimos that were on the limits of hearing, and as a result, all the more dramatic and poignant. This performance will live for ever in the memory, so beautifully crafted and played that it became a completely new experience.

The ADDA audience does tend to bring soloists back on stage for another bow. We are used to demanding an encore. But this ADDA audience’s reaction to Nicolas Baldeyrou was special. The communal recognition that this with something special was almost tangible. The demanded encore was given, and it was again a surprise.

It was the Habañera from Bizet’s Carmen, arranged for clarinet and orchestra. And it was more than a showpiece, more than a lollipop to quieten the crowd. Faultless playing, communicative ensemble, again combined to create a new, surprising experience from what was immediately familiar.

A symphony in name, Cesar Franck’s D Minor has only three movements, two of which are marked allegro, thought you would never know it. Not really a master of orchestration, Franck seems to have concentrated on the storytelling. The musical lines evolve like the narrative of a novel, so that this symphony becomes more like a tone poem than an argument. And, after living in the world of minor keys for most of its duration, the long first movement surprisingly, and without warning, suddenly finds its conclusion in a major key. It’s all quite baffling, like a believer questioning a faith that suddenly returns, dispelling doubt.

And yes, there was an encore. Rune Bergmann again turned to the audience and again smiled that broad grin. “Edvard Grieg La Mañana”, he said. It was the first piece of classical music I ever heard, but it wasn’t  in Spanish.

ADDA hosts Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations in Elements and Furies

Sometimes a program does not seem attractive. Since I generally prefer more modern sounds, particularly contemporary music, a program that lives in the first half of the eighteenth century is not likely to attract, let alone promise something memorable.

I doubt that my tastes are not the norm amongst most concert audiences who tend to recoil at the thought of contemporary music being played. “Where are the tunes?” they ask.” Do you call that harmony?” I think, but never actually say in response, just listen. Just open up and hear if the composer has anything to say! And never mind the quality, just feel the width. There are textures and sounds that tunes would hide! Can't you feel it? It’s not a question I tend to ask of the eighteenth century, however, since to me so much of the music is all gloss, all decoration. At least that’s the stereotype I often think. And then there was Rebel, and Handel, and Gluck, and finally a clapping Rameau. And so the evening did turn out to be musically memorable.

The pedigree of the performers was beyond doubt. Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations are superstars in their field and a considerable way beyond that as well. They certainly pulled in the crowds, despite their sound being, perhaps, potentially a little small for this auditorium. By the evening’s end, however, one would not have noticed any shortfall.

Jordi Savall has spent a lifetime rediscovering anew old music and establishing a tradition for its performance. He and the orchestra played this program as if they were walking through familiar terrain, but of course the repertoire is vast, and the styles are widely varied. It takes real musicianship, vision, and imagination to bring a program like this to life and these expert performers, did exactly that.

The opening piece was Rebel’s Les Elements. Now this probably surprised anyone expecting wall-to-wall tunes, wrapped in conventional harmony. Written in 1737 and 1738, Rebel’s work was intended to portray the elements of the ancient world, air, fire, earth, and water, or at least their characters and properties in sound. But at the start, the composer wanted to convey Chaos, the disorderly universe as it existed in his imagination before a divine hand had imposed order. With this orchestra, a small band by modern standards, Rebel wanted to convey what a modern mind might hear as a big bang, but he chose to do it subtly, rather than with force. The musical shock of atonal music written early in the eighteenth century is profound. The work progressed, both dramatically and playfully, if not always coherently. The playing was perfect, the overall design somewhat opaque.

Then, we heard music by a German written in Italian style, conceived for a German monarch in England. The first suite of Handel’s Water Music is well known, but deservedly so. Again the opening is a real surprise, with Handel’s melodic and harmonic invention to the fore throughout the piece, which, despite its familiarity, is full of surprises.

Finally, we heard the ballet suite Don Juan ou Le Festin de Pierre (Don Juan, or the Stone Guest's Banquet) by Gluck. The work was listed almost as co-written by Gasparo Angiolini, Gluck’s choreographic collaborator. The work was first performed in 1761 and in it we could hear musical classicism alongside more decorative elements. It was always surprising. The music was vivid, and culminated in Don Juan’s descent into hell with a piece subtitled The Furies. It seemed we had come full circle in that musically we were almost back to the opening of Rebel's The Elements in places. Except that now, it was the power of the musical forces that was being unleashed.

An encore from Rameau was pure romp. In a short introduction, Jordi Savall coached the audience in a five beat twice-given clap to pick out a repeated rhythmic pattern in the work, and the ADDA audience starred by taking the cues in perfect unison. And everyone went home very happy.

 

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.

Vienna surprise – Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber orchestra play Mozart and Schoenberg in Alicante

 

After hearing Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in Alicante’s ADDA concert hall, I was sufficiently surprised by what I had heard to be prompted to download a score as soon as I got home. I don’t think I have ever heard this music played in this way. The impression this event made on me was one of surprise.

The program did not promise a surprise, or even suggest one. On offer was a peculiarly Viennese sandwich, the bread from the first school of the city’s composers and the filling from the second. The two outer layers were both Mozart piano concertos, numbers 25 and 27, whilst the filling was provided by Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1. All of these works are familiar, the Mozart concerti perhaps over-familiar, in that they are played, perhaps overplayed, by a multitude of soloists. The Schoenberg is less commonly included on concert programmes, especially in the style the Mahler Chamber Orchestra chose to present it, but it’s a piece that has been in the repertoire for over a century, so surely there’s nothing new here!

Let’s start with the Schoenberg. As the evening’s programme notes reminded us, the first chamber symphony caused a riot at its first performance in 1907. The music was clearly not what the audience was expecting and, always afraid of the new, they vented their disquiet. And yet this chamber symphony pre-dates Schoenberg’s adoption of the twelve tone system, let alone its later manifestation as serialism. This work is in late Romantic style, but now the key changes are more extreme, the harmonies more dissonant and, perhaps crucially, the ideas pass by faster, rather like a series of juxtaposed miniatures and fragments.

It sounds like a musical equivalent of Braque’s cubism, in that recognizable shapes are still there, but they are cut up, reassembled, overlapped in order to break up the lines and encourage listeners to savour the moment rather than anticipate the next. But there is surely also some of Schiele’s emotional aggression in this music. It remains a piece that challenges its audience to listen, though it does analytically conform to the ‘traditional’ symphonic structure.

Playing this work convincingly on stage needs expert musicians with the habits of the cooperative communication that makes chamber music such a joy. Only with all of these ingredients can performers make a success of this music. Some fifteen members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra stood to play this piece and their performance was almost beyond perfect. Musical ideas were passed around with nods and smiles and the work’s complexity simply became the medium via which these arresting sonorities were communicated. A century can make a massive difference. Suffice it to say that this performance was greeted with cheers, not jeers.

So the filling in the sandwich was very tasty indeed. But what about the Mozart bread and butter that confined it? Well, this was the real surprise. Mitsuko Uchida was soloist and director for both concerti. This in itself is not so rare. But what was utterly surprising, even arresting, was the way the pieces were played. Yes, it was perfect. Yes, all the notes were there and all in the correct order. Yes, these pieces are familiar. But the phrasing and dynamics were chosen to emphasize the music’s emotional meaning, which was beautifully and implicitly communicated. I rarely associate Mozart’s music with emotional involvement. Usually, the sheer decorative elegance gets in the way of human contact, like a hard glaze that hides the material beneath. But this was something quite different and utterly original.

The score I consulted afterwards was that of the Piano Concerto No. 27. Had I ever heard the opening played so quietly? Had I ever heard the pauses inserted to make the sentences and paragraphs of this music make such complete sense? Well, the score did in fact say ‘p’ at the start. Unlike Schoenberg over a century later, Mozart did not use many expression marks to indicate performance style. This is often interpreted as meaning that everything should be played in a mechanical rhythm, with phrasing and emphasis only minimally applied. But in the hands of Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, this Mozart was vivid, emotional and above all communicative rather than showy. And, with deference to Mitsuko Uchida, the dynamics are all there in the score. The real difference was achieved via touch and phrasing, and all of this was a result of Mitsuko Uchida’s playing and interpretation of the score. As was the case with Mozart, himself, and this evening with Mitsuko Uchida, the surprise could be attributed to the presence of genius.

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 - 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 - Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky in Alicante's ADDA

 

Two concerts on consecutive days might be considered by some as a live event to far, especially when the concerts feature big, autobiographical works, one of which at least is widely regarded as difficult. But these two events in Alicante delivered by the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev seemed to make light of the challenge and on both occasions an eager and adoring audience could easily have taken more.

A Friday night program was clearly constructed to show off this magnificent orchestra. We began with Wagner’s Prelude and Good Friday Music from Parsifal. Despite the composer’s reputation for excess, Parsifal, his last opera, is largely contemplative, slow, controlled and unspectacular. The forces are large, but the control is larger and allowed this superb orchestra to generate beautiful, luscious textures within the balance, sounds that give away the sensual aspects of this piece, all encased in an apparently single-minded religious devotion.

The program then offered Prokofiev’s classical symphony. Now this work is conceived as a neo-classical re-visitation of the world of Haydn and Mozart. But, despite its logistically small scale, musically it is sophisticated, often complex, a surreal view of the apparently literal. Throughout, this work’s beautiful interlinking string lines were completely clear, whist remaining integrated in the whole. The resulting surprising harmonies blended to a convincing transformation of world we once thought familiar and the always arresting rhythms were allowed to fight it out.

After the interval this audience was treated to a completely virtuosic performance of Ein Heldenleben by Richard Strauss. Now by definition and intention this music is autobiographical. This is the already successful Richard Strauss showing off. The piece is almost self-promotion, a brilliant succession of tableaux illustrating his claim to be able to do a multitude of things, including the deferral ad infinitum of an obvious cadence. It is also full of self-quotation from a career that had already flourished, despite the fact that there was a considerable amount yet to come from this composer who was only in his mid-forties. It is a poet’s statement, says its title, but the self-knowledge here is far from analytical. This is undoubtedly a work that demands complete mastery from the partnership that is conductor and orchestra, and this particular performance excelled. We were treated to an encore, a Strauss waltz, no relation.

Our second concert of this mini-series featured a single work, if the word single can be applied to the vast complexity of the fourth symphony of Shostakovich, which calls for more than a hundred performers. My personal take on this music is that it is also autobiographical, taking its listeners from birth to a question-marked death, eventually accompanied by the same faltering heartbeat in the basses that signs off Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique.

Autobiographical it may be, but here we are imagining a life yet to be lived by a composer in his thirties. Unlike the Strauss, here the process seems to be highly analytical and, crucially different from Strauss’s self-adulation, the internally reflective process of Shostakovich’s fourth symphony seems to lack confidence. To clarify, this lack of surety has nothing to do with compositional ability, nothing at all to do with an inability to express, and even less to do with the obvious technical mastery that the composer brought to his handling of the orchestra. But in this piece Shostakovich seemed to be conscious of pushing the limits. If only I might express myself, this is what I would like to say. If only I had the space…

Well, we know now that Shostakovich did not have the space and that he withdrew the work and waited twenty-five years before he heard it played, when times were marginally easier for artists. One is left reflecting what the composer might have written subsequently if the work had been allowed its original space. It is paradoxical that his best loved symphony in the West remains the fifth, a work in which he self-corrected the “excesses” that had preceded it. By a quirk of programming, perhaps by design, the next concert in ADDA will feature the fifth.

The forces required were obviously too great for a touring orchestra to muster and so the numbers were made up by incorporating several members of ADDA’s resident orchestra. The achievement of this ad hoc combination was nothing less than breath-taking. This is perhaps one of the most difficult of all works to interpret and yet, despite the scratch team, the performance was nothing less than faultless. Gergiev’s tempi were quite fast in movements two and three, which increases demands of cohesion amongst the strings, a challenge that these players met as if they had played together all their lives.

The fourth symphony takes its audience to some scary places. Even when we waltz, we feel we are looking over our shoulders, and even when we go to the circus, we are watching our back. The heartbeat is permanent, however, and we know we are alive throughout. When, late on, we look back on our achievements, the climax is vast, but the sensation is hollow. There are still things we have not said, and the apparent pride is unconvincing.

But the magnificence of the final questioned peace is undiminished. The heart may falter and the body decline, but eventually we are what we are, nothing more. And that is probably when we realise we control precisely nothing and that what went before may as well have been a dream. Sounds like Shakespeare.

I have written of the work elsewhere, but this live performance, only the second one I have had the privilege to attend, confirms in my own mind a personal view that this work, the Symphony Number Four of Dmitri Shostakovich, is nothing less than the greatest single work of art the human race has thus far produced. Okay, I will tone down the superlatives: it is the human race’s greatest artwork that I personally have encountered. And this performance did it more than justice.

Saariaho's La Passion de Simone

It's a comment both on current availability and prevailing mentality that I choose to write a piece about a television experience, albeit via the internet. There are not many concerts around during this year of lock down.

The broadcast in question was courtesy of Operavision and, given rules on social mixing around Europe at the time of the recording - last October - it is no surprise it came from Sweden. It was a performance of the oratorio La Passion de Simone, based on the writings of Simone Weil composed by Kaija Saariaho on text by Amin Maalouf. This is a piece for orchestra, chorus and soprano that its composer describes both as an oratorio and an opera. The latter is stretching concepts, because there is only one character and no action. There are also electronics, which extend further than the taped quotations from Simone Weil's work that mark the movements, to include at various points augmentation to the orchestral sounds in order to change textures, add depth or surprise.

The structure is fifteen movements, each representing one station of the cross, the whole representing a passion play. The underpinning idea is that the life and work of mystic, political thinker and philosopher, Simone, Weil, was like that of a modern Christ, who gave her life to identify the shortcoming in the rest of humanity. This does not seem to come across in the music, perhaps because, in updating the idea, Saariaho and Maalouf have completely transformed the image into something both contemporary and unfamiliar.

Simone Weil was academically successful, a classmate of Simone de Beauvoir, and one time Marxist. She was born into a middle-class professional Jewish family and excelled from the start, but not in the realm of health. And her eyesight was none too good…

She took a job in a factory at one stage to fully understand what it was to be a worker. She took up arm on behalf of the anarchists in Spain, before her comrades took the rifle away from her on account of her eyesight’s inability to aim it. She had always had a “spiritual” streak, it seems, and later on went on to formulate a pantheistic version of Christianity, apparently rejecting her Judaism. She eventually, aged 34, finished up in hospital in Britain with tuberculosis. And died. The judgment was that she had in fact starved herself to death. The basis of Saariaho’s piece is that this was an act of personal sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity.  The case is made.

Saariaho's music is all about timbre and texture. It tends to sound one paced, though it rarely is. It deceptively seems to offer a wall of experience but close up that expanse of sound comprises many miniscule shards. The chorus acts like a commentator, not quite like an evangelist as in Bach, but always playing a secondary role compared to the presence of the soprano soloist. The principal character is not only the voice of Simone Weil, but also a commentary on her writing, an interpreter, sometimes even a third person critic, probably the voice of the author. And Sophie van Otter's performance is so good it is impossible to describe. One aspect of the text which I do not understand is the repeated references to Simone as if the narrator is a younger sister. Simone had no younger sister, so this is perhaps the personification of the rest of humanity who have adopted her as a sibling in gratitude to her gesture of solidarity.

But overall, as so often with Saariaho, we are left with a sense of something having passed us by, greeted us perhaps, held our attention for its duration, but without ever really revealing itself to us. It may be an enigmatic style, but it may also be something deeply personal, as the composer revealed in the barely comfortable interview that followed. It may be shyness, a desire to remain apart, removed from direct contact. It was also revealing to hear the composer say that this was only the work’s second production in 14 years.

Costa Blanca Arts Update – Orquesta de Valencia under Trigueros and guitarists in Alicante

Two concerts in five days might sound quite a lot, but we achieved that by skipping the others on offer. But could one imagine two more different musical events? How many times across two concerts have you been presented with orchestral music and solo guitar comprising ten works, seven of which you have never hear before and featuring no less than four composers who are completely new to you? And this comment comes from someone who has a personal library of recordings that feature almost five thousand different composers… 

The Orquesta de Valencia under José Trigueros gave their concert in La Rambleta Arts Centre in Valencia. The acoustic of the hall might be a little too dry for music, but it must have served the orchestra’s purposes well for their recording session.

It began with the Serenata Española by Miguel Asins Arbó, who was known for writing music for film and television. This was an atmospheric piece that made its point by understatement, which is not a word that would apply to Keiko Abe’s Prism Rhapsody No2. This is a highly virtuoso concerto for two marimbas and orchestra. The solo parts were played by Josep Furió and Luis Osca with the kind of expertise that leaves an audience breathless both from exhaustion and admiration. There is a lot to do for the musicians in this piece, which is roller-coaster excitement from beginning to end. But it is also highly crafted music, skilfully constructed to do more than merely shimmer in the light. It was a piece of contemporary music that was rapturously received by the audience, prompting the players to offer an encore that allowed them to show off a more reflective side of their instruments.

After the interval, we were treated to a superb reading of the Symphony No10 by Shostakovich. Now this is a work that I have personally been listening to for more than fifty years. And still, it never fails to make its point. In live performance, it’s a work that comes alive beyond the pyrotechnics of its presence. It has a humanity and depicts a world that is a great deal more personal than many analyses might suggest. Particularly impressive was Trigueros’s reading of the scherzo, which he conducted from memory. Hearing such a work again is like meeting an old friend who always surprises.

The next trip was to Alicante to hear students from the Esplá conservatory. They were all on a master’s course in performance, so they ought to be nearing professional standard. The three of them were superb, but the last, Juan José Rodriguez, was outstanding. It was not what he played, it was how he played it. The pieces were shaped, communicative and faultless all at the same time.

Before him, Xuan Lien Liu gave a very clear and evenly paced account of the Sor Sonata. I feel that Sor was less at home with sonata form than with other ways of expressing himself, though I hesitate to belittle the towering achievement of this work. The form, however, appears to dominate the writing, but in this performance, there was a little hint of “going through the motions”. The playing was superb, if a little unspectacular, though this is no criticism because the music itself demands this kind of approach.

Miguel Verdu Andreu chose a much more ambitious programme. He started with the first movement of a sonata for guitar. The Amando Blanquer that followed was industrial in conception. The music was not composed using serial techniques, but it did employ atonality. The form was always clear, and it owed much to classical structures, but the material was like hardened steel. Again, the playing was completely convincing.

The last performer also started with an off-programme piece and continued with two works by a Valencian composer, Vicente Asenio. Who also had good connections with Alicante. The music was superb. The playing better.

This was completely modern guitar music, but there was more than a hint of the vernacular style about the compositional technique, hardly surprising when paying homage to Lorca. The Collectici Intim was a five-movement suite that had the clear structure of a five-movement single work. There was a musical sense to the overall shape, a sense that was admirably conveyed by the expert, Juan José Rodriguez

Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers by Paul Rosenfeld

 

Tastes change. Fashions change. Presumptions, through whose refracting prisms each new age interprets its aesthetics, also change, but usually unpredictably because we absorb the restrictions without being conscious of their control. It’s probably called culture, and perhaps we are all imprisoned by its inherently commercial pressure. And we only rarely perceive change in our ability to respond to stimuli, often surprisingly perceived when we remove our experience into a different culture, a different aesthetic and possibly another time. This is precisely why exploration of criticism from the past can be so rewarding and, in a way that the writing would never have achieved in its contemporary setting, challenging. It was this kind of experience that flowed from every page of Paul Rosenfeld’s Musical Portraits.

These “Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers” were published in 1920, having previously appeared as occasional pieces elsewhere. A hundred years on, of course, the first challenge is the meaning of the word “modern” in its title, especially when the presented list of composers starts with Wagner and finishes with Bloch. Personally, I have nothing against classifying Bloch as “modern” in the 1920s, but the inclusion of Wagner is surely pushing the definition, since he had already been dead for over 35 years.

Reading Rosenfeld’s text, however, one quickly understands Wagner‘s inclusion. For the writer, Wagner’s work created the cusp between the feudal and modern worlds. His stature and influence was still so great, his achievements still considered so monumental, that this work of critical appraisal just had to begin with his name. Rosenfeld sees his music dramas as manifestations of a new industrial age, reflecting the unprecedented might of the new coal-powered civilization.

Strauss, Richard, of course, comes next. Pure genius, he is judged, at least on the evidence of his early symphonic poems, which approached a realization of the Nietzschean dream via colours that suggested impressionist painting. By the time we reach Salome, however, he had become “a bad composer”, “once so electric, so vital, so brilliant a figure” had transformed into someone “dreary and outward and stupid”. Rosenkavalier is judged “singularly hollow and flat and dun, joyless and soggy”. One must recall that this was 1920 and that Richard Strauss still had over 20 years of creative life remaining.

Mussorgsky’s “marvelous originality” was an expression of the true nature of Russian folklore, culture and peasant life. Liszt, on the other hand, was offering work like “satin robes covering foul, unsightly rags”, “designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, but executed in stucco and other cheap materials”. The impression was vivid, but the substance close to zero.

Berlioz, on the other hand, had grown in stature. His music was judged barbarous and radical and revolutionary, “beside which so much modern music dwindles”. He was the first to write directly for the orchestra as an instrument.

Cesar Franck suffers the ignominy of having a good part of his section devoted discussions of Saint-Saens. He can be gratified, however, that the author judges his work greater than that of this more famous composer, who seemed to seek only an increase in opus numbers. Franck’s own music  is seen as an expression of the silent majority, those who feel “forsaken and alone and powerless”, the army of society’s workers. The basis for this is that Franck had himself to work for a living.

Claude Debussy, by contrast, already seems to Rosenfeld to have achieved the status of a god, so elevated by aesthetic and achievement from the rest of humanity that it could hardly be considered he had ever composed a bad note. The piano of this most perfect living musician, becomes “satins and liqueurs”, his orchestra sparkling “with iridescent fires ... delicate violets and argents and shades of rose”.

Ravel is something of a problem child, certainly impressive, but whose judgment is not quite trusted, no matter how engaging it might sound. “Permitted to remain, in all his manhood, the child that we all were”, he seems to receive a pat on the head to encourage him to try harder.

Borodin, a true proud nationalist, suffered from “flawed originality”. But his music, like an uncovered, uncut piece of porphyry or malachite is perfect in its natural, unpolished state. Rimsky-Korsakov, on the other hand, is merely decorative and graceful, but also vapid, whilst Rachmaninoff offered product that was “too smooth and soft and elegantly elegiac, simply too dull”. It was the music of the pseudo-French culture of the Saint Petersburg upper crust.

Scriabine, however, “awakened in the piano all of its latent animality”. He wrote music that “hovered on the borderland between ecstasy and suffering”, probably bitter-sweet to the layman. But Strawinsky was the ultimate realist. A product of industrialization, he produced “great weighty metallic masses, molten piles and sheets of steel and iron, shining adamantine bulks”. So real were the impressions in his music that one might even smell the sausages grilling at Petrushka’s fair.

Four contemporary “German” composers are thoroughly dismissed, Strauss being bankrupt, Reger grotesquely pedantic, Schoenberg intellectually tainted and Mahler banal, despite the fact that only two of the four were actually German. Specifically, Mahler’s scores were “lamentably weak, often arid and banal”. It seems that much of Rosenfeld’s criticism arises out of an inquisitorial distrust of Mahler’s sincerity in converting from Judaism. The music of Reger, the author judges, is unlikely to suffer a revival and the composer himself is described as being like a “swollen, myopic beetle, with thick lips and sullen expression, crouching on an organ bench”. Let us say no more. Schoenberg is a troubling presence, formalistic and intellectual. He smells of the laboratory and exists in an obedience to some abstract scholastic demand. We are still discussing music, by the way.

Sibelius personifies nationalism, Finnish nationalism, of course. As it emerges from its domination under the Russian yoke, Finnish identity suddenly realizes it has a beautiful landscapes, meadows and forests.

Loeffler, surprisingly, gets a full entry. Perhaps it has something to do with his opting to live in the United States. Ornstein will be a name that is perhaps unfamiliar to 21st-century music lovers. At the time he was a brilliant 25-year-old pianist who was embarking on the composition of tough, rugged scores. And finally Bloch is praised for introducing non-European and oriental influences into western music. He is praised for retaining his Jewish identity and culture, which suggests that Mahler might have got off with lighter criticism had he not rejected the faith and thus have allowed they author to note the similarity of that composer’s clarinet writing to klezmer.

Opinion in the words of Paul Rosenfeld often presents a florid display, mixing prejudice and observation, and pre-judgment with insight. He describes his appreciation of these twenty composers through the distorting lens of his own aesthetic, derived from the assumptions of his age. Reading this short, concentrated work, we soon appreciate that we are doing the same. Only the language and the presumptions are changed.

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.