Mahler Seven by the Tonhalle Zurich under Paavo Jarvi in ADDA Alicante

A concert program that devotes 77 minutes to a single work is not commonly encountered. Yes, there are the symphonies of Mahler and Bruckner and Shostakovich, but what else would commonly occupy such a length of time? It was with some excitement that this big event was anticipated.

The bill was, without question, up to the challenge. Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra is certainly one of the world’s leading orchestras, and Paavo Järvi’s name could not be bigger in the world of conducting. This particular Mahler Symphony, number seven, is one that I last heard in live performance in a concert over fifty years ago on London’s South Bank. So even the torrential rain in Alicante that surrounded this evening could not damp the enthusiastic anticipation.

Well, did the evening live up to the expectation? Of course it did. The performance was faultless, even brilliant at times, even if it could be argued the Paavo Järvi’s tempo in the faster sections of the first movement could have been a little faster. The overall impression, however, was that the contrasted were stark but never grotesque. This is truly sophisticated music that almost constantly surprises the listener, and it must be expertly played to make sense. The Tonhalle Orchestra took every challenge in its substantial stride and in this variation-like movement, one could not even hear the joins.

Mahler 7 is a groundbreaking symphony in many ways, not least in its structure. A first movement that is alternatively fast and then reflective lasts for 22 minutes. Its loose variation form revisits the same material, but Mahler’s imagination keeps the sound fresh throughout, never in the slightest repetitive. The central section of the movement, that momentary vision of marital bliss, does eventually disintegrate to chaos.

The finale is Mahler perhaps at his most optimistic. The movement seems to dance several waltzes along the way, but overall the feeling is that everyone is having a good time, even though the dance may seem to have a strange shape here and there.

The central scherzo is a very strange experience. Mahler more often than not uses the scherzo to be loud, abrasive, even cynical. But in the seventh, it seems more like a bad dream half-remembered. In between two movements, entitled Night Music, it sounds as if the composer was trying to get to sleep, then nodded off for a short time and dreamt, and then woke up before dawn to lie awake again. The night music movements are perhaps stranger than the scherzo, given their placement after a grand opening and before a triumph for conclusion. Overall, Mahler’s seventh seems like an inverted arch, with a keystone sticking up annoyingly in the middle to stop listeners from sliding down or up.

On a thoroughly successful evening, when the concert received rapturous applause from its audience, I find the need again to praise the ADDA audience for being such wonderful listeners. It’s as if this audience actually absorbs the music.

 

ADDA Simfonica in Bernstein and Mahler with Josep Vicent and Josu de Solaun

Some concerts are different from the norm. Some turn out to be different, some look different from the start. Last Friday in ADDA, Aliante, our concert fell into both categories.

The start looked conventional enough with an overture. But this was Bernstein, and upbeat Bernstein to boot. As the evening progressed, this celebratory, overtly smiling music became a focus for the theme of ‘false hilarity’ that underpinned the rest of the program. Though the Candide Overture is upbeat, and it is an audience please, its origins are on Broadway, a place that, for the stage, peddles the same kind of illusory happiness that creates sparkling plastic dreams on film in Hollywood. It was a perfect start, played perfectly, and received with much enthusiasm.

But then the mood changed. On the backdrop, we saw a painting by Edward Hopper, whose canvases at first sight seem to be technicolour stills from the black-and-white of Hollywood’s golden era. But a closer look reveals that usually no one is talking to anyone else. No one is even noticing where they are. Their environment is stripped of many of the accoutrements of modern life, indicating a colourless life, lived in a rainbow. The people seem self-absorbed, but neither happy nor reflective. They are, it seems, anxious. Alongside a passage capturing the spirit of Auden’s poem, which talked of going for a drink with a chance encounter, and then feeling a sense of false hilarity, the image was the perfect introduction to the world of what followed, which was Bernstein Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety.

This is an enigmatic work. It claims to be a symphony, but equally it could be a piano concerto. Josu Solaun was the soloist. His playing was the perfect balance of detachment and energy that the work demands. There are many periods of silence, interspersed with percussive passages. In the hands of a pianist not thoroughly in sympathy with the work’s overall character, this part can easily become across as disjointed and incoherent. In the right hands, it is a portrayal of an individual’s experience of the modern age of anxiety, false hilarity mixed with anxious self-absorption, reflection not softened by religious belief. This is a tough world that, even when it invites you in, leaves you isolated.

Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety is not a work that will bring the house down. But in ADDA, Alicante last Friday, it did. It is certainly a work that will be remembered by an audience privileged to hear it. But it won’t send them home humming an earworm. But of course Candide will. The contrast is at least part of the point.

If the first half was something of a surprise, then the second half exceeded. We heard three movements from different Mahler symphonies under the general title of The Echo of Being. The music came from the third movement of the Symphony No. 4, the Totenfeier from Symphony No. 2 and the fourth movement from Symphony No. 9. The idea was that these would accompany The Echo of Being, a three-sectioned film made by Lucas van Woerkum based on the life of the composer. Each section concentrated on one member of a three- person family, a mother, a dying daughter, and a father.

Musically, and surprisingly, this hung together. The slow movement start is tender, but underpinned by alienation and, when the outburst comes, bitterness, which then transforms into regret. The violence and anger of the Totenfeier here becomes the suffering of illness with all the resentment this brings. Then, the valedictory fourth movement of the Symphony No. 9 seems to approach the unknown of death, but from the standpoint of thinking you know who you are. There is a familiarity about the unknown experience, perhaps a false heaven arrived at before death claims life. The illusion becomes complete, and the survivor survives, alone.

By the end of the concert, the ADDA audience was in suitably reflective mood. As the dying tones of the fourth movement of Mahler nine drifted towards silence, so did the audience. At the end, Josep Vicent left the audience to enjoy this beautiful sensation of shared quiet. It was prolonged and memorable. And so was the joy of those minutes. There was nothing false or hilarious about this profound experience.

I forgot to mention Josu de Solaun’s encore. The Debussy Prelude was certainly lighter than what had gone before, but it was no less disturbing. What was utterly impressive was the fact that the Solaun could play pianissimo in front of an audience of over a thousand, where everyone could hear everything perfectly and no one missed a note.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Orchestra La Scala Milan under Riccardo Chailly in Alicante's ADDA

 A program juxtaposing two first symphonies has to invite comparison. When those first symphonies are those of Ludwig van Beethoven and Gustav Mahler, arguably at either end of the nineteenth century German Romantic tradition, then that comparison must include considerations of what happened to the style, if indeed it ever existed as an identifiable entity.

The orchestra, La Scala, Milan under its conductor Riccardo Chailly, has a tradition with Mahler symphonies, and this is very much the tradition of its conductor. Ricardo Chailly, the program noted, has over 150 recordings to his name and he also has recorded a complete Mahler symphony cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus. ADDA’s audience thus expected a lot from the evening. There was no disappointment.

Beethoven’s First Symphony was premiered in 1800. Stylistically, it is rooted in the tradition that Haydn and Mozart had created in the previous century, but from its opening, Beethoven’s first is different. While we now label the earlier era as classical, Beethoven’s first surely heralded the era of Romanticism, where the expression of individual emotions rather than structural integrity was to be the focus of artistic intentions.

The structure is there from the previous classical era. Sonata form is evident in the first movement and elsewhere. The fast, slow, minuet and finale format is preserved, but the principal keys, which still dominate the work, arrive more by suggestion than by statement and the minuet is barely danceable because its character is that of the modern scherzo. The very word implies a musical joke, perhaps a piece of trivia included to express personal feelings and reflections.

This is thus a work that represents a revolution of symphonic thinking, but this revolution was not a break with the past, more its extension and amplification into new territory. And though Beethoven’s orchestra was large for its era, it still comprised only double winds and no trombones or tuba. What characterizes the music, however, as so often in Beethoven, is the possibility that the inspiration came from the composer’s memory of dance tunes and popular music, reworked and remodelled into “serious” form.

And so to the link. At the end of that nineteenth century, Gustav Mahler announced another stylistic revolution with his first symphony, whose most noticeable difference from the Beethoven was immediately the size of the orchestra employed. There are four movements again. But now the movements pay only lip service to the formal structures of sonata form, which, like Beethoven’s introduction of the tonic, is via suggestion rather than statement. The placing of the slow movement third rather than second began with Beethoven, so this was nothing new.

But what Mahler did that was revolutionary was to incorporate folk-like melodies into the symphonic argument and render that argument largely textural. Here, the composer seems to want to explore the range of sonorities that these large forces could generate. But despite the composer’s reputation for deploying large forces, these sonorities are only rarely loud or brash. These contrasts are textural and coloristic, clearly intended to convey to the listener the quality of an experience, rather than its narrative.

A contemporary listener can only imagine what an audience in central Europe made of a slow movement that juxtaposed a funeral march based on a French children’s song with passages that derived from Jewish Klezmer dance music.

Perhaps the finale is a little too meandering and perhaps its triumphal end is overblown. But who cares? And this performance, under the watchful eye of Ricardo Chailly, was wonderfully detailed. Here we heard all the sonorities and all the dynamic changes in intricate and vivid detail. Everything seemed to make sense, even those passages where the composer seemed to delight in the tangential. The use of rubato was obvious, but never overdone. Everything made musical sense to the extent that during the first movement this listener heard the progress as a walk through scenic countryside! It is a work I have heard many times before but with Riccardo Chailly’s vision and supremely masterful reading, I now can’t wait for the next performance.

And what about the comparison, Beethoven to Mahler, mentioned at the start? Beethoven arguably invented the individual’s experiential centrality in the symphony. No longer was the form a rigid frame that had to contain certain elements. In his first symphony, Beethoven had not yet fully divested himself of the need to conform, but the innovations he introduced were well developed in Mahler’s time. By the end of that nineteenth century, the individual’s emotions and feelings had become the point of the exercise, not mere suggestion and in Mahler’s first, we meet the composer, not the structure. In fact, the whim of the composer’s intention was about to prompt others, following the current extension of harmonic complexity, to call again for the imposition of structure. There was a tradition, but perhaps by the century’s end, there was nowhere else for the style to go. And, if we were to accept popular tunes into the symphony, why not make folk culture central to the argument? A new era dawned.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Adam Fischer, Elisabeth Leonskaja and the Dusseldorf Symphoniker in Beethoven and Mahler in Alicante's ADDA

 

I have seldom had the privilege of participating in a concert audience that showed their appreciation with such heartfelt enthusiasm. At the end of this performance of Mahler’s First Symphony, the fourth time that this symphony had been performed in this hall in recent years, this particular orchestra, the Dusseldorf Symphoniker, and this unique conductor, Adam Fischer, was cheered loud and long by admirers who stood to pay their respect to the quality of what they had just heard. Again the power of live performance is underlined as yet another life changing experience is perhaps surprisingly provided by a work whose intricacies were already familiar to most of the listeners.

And it must be said that the first half of the evening had already proved to be equally memorable via a performance of an equally familiar piece, the Emperor Concerto of Beethoven. The soloist was to have been Andras Schiff, but he had unfortunately had a fall and could not perform. We must wish him a speedy recovery.

His place at the piano was thus occupied by Elisabeth Leonskaja, no less, and she proved to be much more than a mere replacement. Throughout, her precision and touch were nothing short of breath-taking, especially in the quieter, more subtle parts of a work that too often is treated as a tour de force, which it definitely is not. The concerto provides a soloist with an opportunity to communicate Beethoven’s overall musical idea. Of course there is bravura, but as always with Beethoven, the meaning is in the contrasts, and these must be as vivid as possible. And it’s not just a matter of loud and soft, fast and slow, because the true contrast in this piece lies in the juxtaposition of tenderness alongside the boasting, intimacy alongside grandiloquence. Overall, it is a work that reminds us of our humility and humanity, though it also acknowledges that at times we have to make a show of things.

Elisabeth Leonskaja not only achieved the right balance, not only communicated these contrasts perfectly, but she also brought that something extra, that indefinable quality that we can all sense but never describe when we are in the presence of genius. And that genius became even more apparent when she offered her audience a substantial encore, a piece whish explored the impressionistic and symbolist imagery of music a century later than the work she had just performed. The result was spellbinding.

In the second half, it was the work, not the performer that was the replacement. Originally Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin had been programmed and its replacement brought a certain amount of disappointment to this particular member of the audience. I should not have been concerned, because what transpired over the fifty minutes of the second half was nothing less than miraculous.

Misgivings turned to gold as Adam Fischer’s clearly magical relationship with both the orchestra and the work unfolded. It seemed like the conductor was convinced he could drag extra expression from his players by brute force, persistence and dogged insistence. To describe him as living every note would be understatement, since his relationship with the piece is clearly deeper than that. At one point, there was real concern that he had put too much into his work as he stepped aside to take a short breather. In reality, we all needed that little space. The attention to detail was phenomenal, right down to the balance of the offstage trumpets at the start being controlled by just the right distance to leave the side doors ajar. At the end, Adam Fischer insisted that the final fanfares be delivered by standing horn players and the sound was resplendent. But again, it was in the vision of the overall balance of the symphony that Adam Fischer displayed his complete genius.

The inclusion of a Brahms Hungarian Dance as an encore certainly did not compensate for the missing Bartok, but by then we all felt that we had at least visited the conductor’s cultural home, albeit from afar.

Das Lied von der Erde in ADDA Alicante and a mention for a bass trombone concerto

This was a more than merely memorable concert, ending with the Valse Triste of Sibelius as an appropriate encore. “Appropriate” is an important term, since Mahler’s great song symphony cannot be followed any mere showing off or other lollipop.

Having completed eight symphonies and mindful of the precedent that no composer since Beethoven had completed more than nine symphonies, Gustav Mahler did not officially title Das Lied von der Erde as a symphony, despite labelling it as such in its subtitle. We know that the composer had suffered the loss of his daughter, a professional snub and the diagnosis of an incurable condition in the period that preceded the work’s composition. We also know that he became captivated with Bethge’s free translations of classical Chinese poems. These texts, if I might summarise inadequately, tend to be based in the more mundane aspects of life while alluding to the usual larger imponderables that preoccupy human thought. In many ways, this perfectly reflects Mahler’s tendency to grandiloquence via transforming and reshaping the banal.

Das Lied von der Erde is demanding of all its performers. There are many moments where attention is focused on small sections of its large orchestra, moments when it is impossible for any player to hide. On the other hand, there are abrupt and spiky orchestral tutti that have to be timed perfectly. There are times when string players have to hold very long pianissimo pedal notes and these have to be perfect to achieve their effect. The players of ADDA Simfonica were superb, of course. The singers spend the full hour on stage, and the tenor especially needs to work hard to be heard. The alto, on the other hand, has to negotiate the half hour of final song with total control. In this performance, Ramon Vargas and Cristina Faus were very much more than competent. Their voices seemed perfectly to match the demands of this work. The perfection was probably achieved via rehearsal. It was clear from the start how much time and effort all involved had devoted to getting every detail right.

And a work like this does have to hang together. Six unequal and varied movements, a change of soloist each time, a vast orchestra often called upon to play with the detail and intimacy of chamber music, all of this demands a director with more than the usual amount of control, accuracy and interpretive vision. ADDA’s artistic director, Josep Vicent, seems determined that the resident orchestra should take on challenging repertoire such as this work. And a mixture of Josep Vicent’s obvious talent and his orchestra’s dedication and determination to achieve the highest standards has thus now firmly established their partnership among the elite. I do not care which city you are in. I don’t care about reputations. I do, however, trust both my ear and my experience and for me at least this is as good an orchestra and conductor as can be found. They are worthy of their audience’s adoration, and they will surely make an international name for themselves in the very near future.

Das Lied von Der Erde is not the kind of work where an audience will naturally stand and cheer at the end. It tends to leave an audience in a reflective mood, and it also tends to live long in the memory. This audience did cheer, eventually, after the applause had continued for several minutes and the performance will live in the collective memory as long as it exists. But it is a mark of this hall’s audience’s priorities that, no matter how long the applause has lasted, it always ends with abrupt expectation with any signal for an encore.

As a footnote, I cannot offer this review of the week in Alicante’s ADDA without mentioning the extraordinary performance of José Antonio Marco Almira and Pamela Pérez that brought Daniel Schnyder’s Bass Trombone Concerto to vivid life just a couple of says before the orchestral concert. If one thought that the trombone part of this piece was demanding, one might pause to think of the job done by the pianist. What a performance!

Costa Blanca arts update - No superlatives - L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Alicante with Jonathan Nott and Emmanuel Pahud play Ibert and Mahler

 

There are insufficient superlatives to describe the experience. L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Alicante under Jonathan Nott played Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Ibert’s Flute Concerto with Emmanuel Pahud a soloist so perfectly that ratings and comparisons simply do not apply. When music is this good, it is useless trying to say ‘how’ good it was. The playing transcended descriptions of technique, superseded mere sound and attained a perfection that can only be labelled ‘communication’.

Ibert’s syncretic mix of neo-classicism, humour, jazz and surrealism was so expertly played by Emmanuel Pahud that his virtuosity was almost immediately taken for granted by his audience. Once achieved, that level of experience progresses into a changed awareness where the music is absorbed and known, rather heard or learned. Emmanuel Pahud seemed to invite everyone to participate rather than merely receive. One doubts whether in the packed auditorium there was a single person who did not feel that this was anything other than a personal experience.

And so, when presented with what, it must be said, was probably an unknown work from an under-performed composer, that packed audience found absolutely no barrier of unfamiliarity between themselves and appreciation. Like all concertos, Ibert’s Flute Concerto offers a soloist an opportunity to show off, but here the virtuosic witticism engaged the crowd rather than simply impressed it.

Emmanuel Pahud communicated with the orchestral players, but he also seemed to engage the listeners directly. He was a soloist whose complete mastery of the music and his instrument created something that transcended performance and created genuinely shared experience.

An encore, introduced to the audience’s delight in Spanish, offered a statement of solidarity with the Ukrainian people in general, but especially the soloist’s performing friends and colleagues. This was one of the Jolivet’s Incantations for solo flute, a piece from just before World War II that is prefaced by the composer’s plea a world of serene communion. It was a heart-felt and wholly appropriate message on this dark day.

In his fifth symphony, Gustav Mahler seems eventually to have approached a state of optimism, certainly ecstasy. It is a work best known for its smallest part, the adagietto, a fourth movement that is often both played extracted and often murdered in performance. Its celebrity can too easily dominate, can become the focus, and thus conductors often take it too slowly, rendering its form disembodied, disjointed and meaningless. It becomes sweetness for sweetness’s sake, separate spoons of afters that ignore the identity or obscure the composition of the dish. Not here with Jonathan Nott, however. This adagio was paced towards the andante and so the lines joined into a whole that made sense. And that whole, as far as the symphony in its entirety was concerned, became the perfection that is communication.

This work in sound was read by the audience like a novel, whose complex plot found resonance, understanding and empathy. The biting contrasts of the second movement were expertly played and this movement, which can suffer from lack of direction made perfect sense. And the finale was simply unstoppable, apparently driven by its own internal momentum, the final flourish arising from its own logic, not merely tagged on as an afterthought, as can be the case. There’s simply aren’t the superlatives to do justice to the experience. Let’s just call it perfection.

As a footnote, there must be a mention for Jordi Verges Riart, whose organ recital the night before in Benidorm also delighted. Works by Pachelbel, Buxtehude, JS Bach, Vidor and Vierne were offered chronologically with the transformation and development of style both clear and powerful. It must be said, however, despite the finale of Vierne’s first organ symphony that concluded the recital, the major chord ending of Buxtehude’s G minor prelude provided the most powerful memory.