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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.