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.
