ADDA Simfonica and Trio Vibrart in Beethoven

Again the program looked familiar. The only thing that appeared not to be predictable was the playing. And on that score, the ADDA orchestra under Joseph Vicente, fronted by Trio Vibrart, we surely need not have worried. Indeed, the combination led only to celebration.

The program was all Beethoven. And Beethoven from that period of his creative life when he was actively pushing the boundaries of classical form to the limit in the establishment of musical Romanticism.

The second half was devoted to a performance of the Eroica Symphony. It is difficult to say anything new about work that is a pillar of European culture, a work that is so often performed and recorded. But what was really memorably original about this performance was its audience. It wasn’t that the orchestra played badly and that our collective interest wandered. Far from it! The concentration of this ADDA audience was almost audible at times, or inaudible, if you see what I mean. The quiet passages were listened to with such concentration and silence that every nuance of even the quietest music shone clearly through.

Beethoven’s design thus became completely visible. Obviously, this symphony was written to pay homage to Napoleon, but then the replacement of a triumphal march for a funeral march rendered the piece heroic, rather than laudatory. And what more, in this performance, specifically as a result of its audience’s concentration, the music allowed Beethoven’s purely personal statements to be experienced clearly and intimately. It is often said that the Eroica’s finale was Beethoven’s defiant gesture to his worsening deafness, but in this performance, the suggestions of doubt and insecurity were clearly in evidence. The result was a truly rounded and complete experience, full of vulnerability and self-doubt, as well as energy and heroism. How many pieces with a complete funeral march movement were ever branded triumphal? I simply don’t know. Here, and as much because of the audience’s concentration, we saw the full picture. An encore came from a movement from Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, and it sent everyone home lighter.

The first half and been a complete gem. Beethoven’s Triple Concerto is often problematic in performance. The solo parts are probably not big enough to warrant booking three top-rated soloists. On the other hand, if the playing is less than perfect, or of the featured ensemble does not gel, the sense of a shared chamber music experience, which surely the composer intended but on a larger scale, would be lacking.

In this performance, the ADDA orchestra was fronted by a trio that regularly plays chamber music together, Trio Vibrart, Miguel Colom on violin, Fernando Arias on cello and Juan Pérez Floristán on piano. Individually, they were more than capable of playing concerto-like roles, but they also brought the cohesion of a chamber group to the music. This had the effect of thoroughly integrating the ideas, thoroughly integrating the chamber music of the soloist group with the chamber music-like orchestral interventions and accompaniment. The performance was not only a success: it transcended the concept of success.

As an encore, the Trio Vibrart offered an arrangement of one of Ginastera’s Argentinian Dances. The contrast that this folk-inspired, ever-so-slightly modernistic music presented brought the whole memorable evening together. Bravi to all concerned, especially the audience!

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Going down with a bang - Amsterdam Percussion Group in Altea

Percussion ensembles often try to raise the macho to an art form. Loudness and aggression often predominate, usually to the detriment of music. Obvious exceptions would be any Korean samulnori ensemble, where the macho is utterly enshrined, Gary Burton at his best, anything involving Steve Reich and, in the past, occasionally, Kodo. But often they seemed intent on beating the guts out of their Japanese temple drums. 

Now I must add the Amsterdam Percussion Group to the list of subtler performers, their concert in Palau Altea proving to be a complete joy. Altea-born Josep Vicent fronts the group. For six years he was a percussionist with one of the world’s greatest orchestras, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, and is now also a superb conductor in his own right. Anyone who attended his reading of Bernstein’s West Side Story Suite with the World Orchestra of Jeunesse Musicales in Villajoyosa and La Nucia earlier this year will testify to that. 

But Josep Vicent is also a stunningly accomplished performer and percussionist. Surely he is destined for significant international recognition. The Amsterdam Percussion Group varied from three to six players. The three core members are all percussionists and, in Palau Altea, their battery of instruments was occasionally augmented by cello, guitar and bass guitar. 

The musical style is minimalist, the debt to Steve Reich explicit, but there was Gary Burton there as well in the jazz-style four mallet vibraphone techniques. Fundamental to Steve Reich’s musical personality was the idea of performance above recording and, surely, this philosophy was fundamental to everything offered by Josep Vicent’s group. 

They started with what proved to be a weakness, apparently improvising a climactic modal interchange over a musique concrète tape. In the 1960s I might have been impressed. The cello piece that followed eventually became vibraphone and bass guitar, and again it left a lot to be desired in the inspiration box.  

Then things came to life. The three percussionists played four tuned drums, offering a piece reminiscent of the first part of Steve Reich’s Drumming. It was superbly done, loud and musical, its rhythms complex yet immediately memorable. 

Quiet then intervened in the form of a Piazzolla tango played by a quintet, again with vibes and marimba. This was followed by one of the evening’s true high points, a piece called Black Page by Frank Zappa. The first section’s difficult chromatic cello led on to a ferocious and supremely skilful unison doubling of Josep Vicent’s drums and the marimba of Mike Schaperclaus, before the piece made its minimal point in vast proportions. 

The evening’s high point came next. It was the quietest piece of the night, played by the three percussionists, Josep, Mike and Arie de Boer, seated like kids at a party on the edge of the stage. Before them were three square bits of smooth plywood, each mounted on what appeared to be a couple of off cuts of two-by-one, amplified. With forehand and backhand strokes, finger prods, karate chops, slaps and taps, the three of them offered Table Music by Thierry de Mey, a percussive ballet for six hands. 

A sextet reminiscent of Gary Burton’s early jazz followed and then a piece of pure Africa, a fast, explosive piece of Burundian drumming. A flamenco-style sextet with guitar completed the performance, which was greeted with a universal standing ovation, and deservedly so. If you missed this one, there’s always the next time. They were exciting, subtle and musical, as well as loud. Josep Vicent will be back. He’s from Altea, after all.

An orchestral concert 14 July 2007, Festival – Nits de la Mediterrania, La Nucia - Twentieth Century Ballets

The final concert of the inaugural La Nucia arts festival took place last night. Starting at 10:30pm, it was staged in the town’s recently completed open air auditorium and featured the World Youth Orchestra directed, again masterfully, by Josep Vicent. 

Given the setting, it would have been so easy to present a procession of pop classics that would have the punters humming along happily. I attended, for once not having even tried to research the programme, a task that is usually rendered essential here in Spain since the detailed list of works is rarely printed on the publicity material. Having mentioned the setting, it has to be described.

The town of La Nucia, just 5 kilometres inland, up the hill behind Benidorm, has been transformed in recent years. I have lived in the town for over four years and have seen an almost complete transformation in that time. It was a beautiful, if quiet place in 2002, when I first visited. Since then a major project of refurbishment and reinvention has been undertaken. Besides a new road, the town now has several shopping complexes, new health centres, libraries, community centres, playgrounds and parks. The most important additions, if, like me, you have a keen interest in the arts, have been the beautiful 600 seat concert hall and, across the road, an outside auditorium that can seat up to 3000. 

Back at the start of the year the World Youth Orchestra under Josep Vicent inaugurated the Concert hall, l’Auditori de la Mediterrànea, with a concert in which a 110 piece orchestra performed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It’s a piece that can be its own parody, if played badly. Now I would claim to know just about every note of the piece and in my humble opinion Josep Vicent’s reading of the score, frankly, was perfect. 

And so to the setting. La Nucia is perched on the side of a valley that runs down to the sea from the Sierra Aitana and the mountain, Puig Campaña. On the other side of the valley is Polop, a pretty, floodlit, tumbling Costa Blanca town of pastel shades beneath a hilltop citadel. Beyond, the large town of Callosa d’en Sarrià, the centre of the unique nispero trade, lies illuminated at the base of the Sierra Guadalest. Turning a little to the right, there is the jagged junction between rock and sky that is the summit line of the Sierra Bernia and then, over the now well-known town of Altea, the Mediterranean. Behind the outdoor auditorium’s stage, a row of houses and shops become a backdrop for lighting effects. I hope the residents don’t mind. 

Frankly, it would be hard to imagine a more beautiful place to listen to music, except for the reservation, of course, that the outdoor setting needs amplification, which makes the sound flat. That, I believe, need not be too much of a handicap if the programme is well thought out. And last nights concert triumphed in that respect. 

So, initially not expecting much, I took my seat and looked (as best I could in the dark) at the works on offer. Sandwiched between two of Alberto Ginastera’s dances for the Estancia Dances Op8 (1941), we were to be offered Stravinsky’s Firebird, Tres movimientos tanguisticos porteños by Astor Piazzolla and a complete Al Amor Brujo of Manuel de Falla. If the prospect on reading the list of works watered the mouth, the reality simply stunned. Ginastera’s Danza del Trigo (Dance of the Wheat) rushed and raced to evoke effects of wind gusts on a wheat field. Rhythms and keys are crossed and the music speeds along without actually being fast! I recall an article by Colin Matthews some years ago about how to write music that sounds very fast while in fact changing very slowly. The Stravinsky, of course, is utterly well known, and like the other two ballets in what most of us regard as his early romantic trilogy, it can become a cliché. But not in the hands of Josep Vicent, who has a complete understanding of the composer’s music. It was superbly played, never rushed, but never allowed to rest. 

What followed was a different universe. Astor Piazzolla is known as a composer of tangos, which, for some reason tend to be associated with the lightweight. Josep Vincent, in his introduction to the piece, Tres movimientos tanguisticos porteños, was at pains to tell us that Piazzolla was a “classical” composer who studied with Nadia Boulanger. Yes, true, and he also studied with Ginastera and others, declaring, himself, that he had developed a profound love of Bach. The reference is apposite, since the last of these three tangos turned out to be a complex fugue! I know a number of the composer’s works very well, having heard Joachim Palomares’s ensemble on several occasions and having played the Barenboim disc regularly. But these pieces were as hard as nails. Rhythmically they were tangos, but if you think that Stravinsky’s music might be associated with toughness (which I don’t) you should try these three orchestral pieces by Astor Piazzolla. As ever, Piazzolla uses minor keys, sometimes rather confused minor keys as well. The gloom would be unremitting were it not for his utterly inventive use of form. Throughout, however, there was that little trilling turn that is his musical signature. Surely he was one of the twentieth century’s most original musical voices. 

The only work on the programme by a Spanish composer was next, a full account of El Amor Brujo of Manuel de Falla. Written in 1915, the score blends elements of Flamenco from the composer’s native Andalusia with “classical” forms. Scored for medium-sized orchestra and voice, it was performed last night by Mayte Martin, who specialises in flamenco-style singing and she was quite excellent. Necessarily under-stated because of the nature of the piece, her singing added a sonority to the overall sound that transformed the whole piece into something unique. The extremely famous Ritual Fire Dance at the core of the work raised its own round of applause, despite being offered in an intriguingly controlled way in Josep Vicent’s reading. It worked, since the restraint prevented the section dominating the work and thereby held our attention more for the vocal sections. 

And then to finish the evening was a real bit of summer night out. Malambo, another of the Ginastera Opus 8 dances, closed the show. Now I will freely admit that when I am in a concert of any type an invitation that we might “put our hands together” and clap along with the music usually leaves me feeling empty and, often, not a little resentful, because it usually indicates a concert that is so poorly presented by the performers that they have to do something cheap to drum up support. But when the conductor turned to the audience, a few phrases into Malambo and indicated participation, frankly, it was impossible not to comply. The piece is utterly infectious. The whole audience joined in – AND the whole audience was utterly attentive, able to react immediately when the conductor turned to quell the clapping with a wave of the hand to allow a detailed variation in the music to come through, and then start again as requested as the main rhythm returned. 

Five works in the concert, three of which I had not heard before, faultless playing by the World Youth Orchestra and, as ever, the highest possible standards of interpretation under the direction of Josep Vicent …. Quite beautiful.