ADDA sets off for a tour of Japan with Rimsky-Korsakov, Rodrigo, Tchaikovsky and Khachaturian with Kaori Muraji

 

In the second concert of the new season, ADDA Simfónica under their artistic director Joep Vicent last night offered a mix of perhaps overstated bravura interspersed with one of music’s great understatements. At the start, I will say that no longer is it necessary to describe this orchestra, conductor or venue in glowing terms. Everyone in last night's audience, ADDA regulars, knows that this is now amongst the finest orchestras in the world, and that the ADDA venue approaches perfection in terms of view and acoustics. The orchestra has by now set off on a tour of Japan. Success brings the pressures of demands, but the ADDA project has become a resounding success for all concerned.

Last night’s program opened with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnole. It made a popular start to a concert that did rather concentrate on well-known favourites. But these pieces are well known and favourite because, in the right hands, they continue to deliver unforgettable experiences and this version of Capriccio Espagnole did deliver. I still find Rimsky-Korsakv’s orchestration rather heavy, however.

Then there followed the evening’s understatement. If one is trying to make a noise, then the last instrument to choose is a guitar, which is almost impossible to play forté. The beauty of good writing for the instrument, however, lies in its ability to be totally personal, apparently to make public the player’s inner most thoughts.

Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is the best known of all guitar concertos. Its fame is often as a result of the separation of the slow movement as a lollipop to sweeten an audience. The practice is mistaken, however, because by itself it can be played mournfully, making it a sad piece of music designed to make everyone in the audience sadder. In its rightful place, between two brightly lit neoclassical allegros, the slow movement becomes merely a time to reflect. Whereas the outer movements present a sunlit landscape, the central movement describes the exact same landscape at twilight. Everything is softer, cooler, gentler, but it is never mournful. The Japanese soloist, Kaori Muraji, who performed last night and will accompany ADDA on the tour of Japan, was clearly enjoying every moment. Rodrigo’s brilliant and sympathetic orchestration never drowns the guitar’s small voice and overall creates a spectacular tense excitement that is never lost. Superb: superb writing, a superb work, superbly performed.

Kaori Muraji offered an encore of one of her own pieces, inspired, she told the audience, by old Japanese temples. The audience heard, I would suggest, especially in the right hand, something that reminded them of more nearby historical sites.

The second half opened with another popular favourite. Tchaikovsky suite from Swan Lake has some of the most familiar tunes in the repertoire. What is often ignored, is how spectacular is the orchestration which, of course, the ADDA orchestra made crystal clear and exciting.

Our evening came to a close with a selection from Khachaturian’s Spartacus. If what had gone before was not sufficiently melodic or rhythmically arresting, then this selection from Khachaturian’s ballet was a perfect was the perfect solution. The grand, Romantic string theme, at least for British ears, remains associated with sailing ships on a Sunday evening, and the viciously rhythmic sections almost bit the ears. And this superb playing of the ADDA orchestra was offered twice, as they repeated the upbeat section as an encore.

Conrado Moya plays marimba and Shostakovich 10 brings the house down in Alicante

 

A piano concerto played in a transcription for marimba is not a common event. It is even rarer when it is the Concierto Heroico of Joaquin Rodrigo, which, unlike his moderately popular harp concerto and his enormously popular guitar concerto, is itself also quite a rarity. And so, this first half of the programme promised to be a doubly rare experience.

Rodrigo‘s Concerto is an eclectic mix. Across four movements his largely neoclassical style is here and there mixed with some modernistic tendencies, especially in the rhythms and the harmonies within the orchestral tutti. These elements are placed alongside some themes whose banality, on occasions, could generally and generously be described as “popular”. These apparently disparate strands are woven into the piano part, which ranges from the virtuosic to the repetitive. On disc it comes across as an inconsistent and only moderately successful work. Episodic would be the least critical label that might be attached to the music. Refreshing, different, and surprising would be an alternative.

But this concerto also has music of great effect, immediacy and expression. And all these qualities found expression in the playing of the marimba soloist, Conrado Mora, and in the lively interpretation offered by Josep Vicent and the ADDA orchestra.

The marimba soloist can muster only four simultaneous notes instead of the piano’s potential of ten, but the resulting lightening of texture seemed to make the musical argument, hardly linear in this piece, rather clearer. And Conrado Mora played with such virtuosity and energy the audience probably felt exhausted just watching. The arrangement itself and its execution were real triumphs of musical imagination, and the performance was rapturously applauded. An encore for solo marimba featured the instrument in a more reflective style. I think it was a piece by Keiko Abe, but please do correct me if I’m wrong.

The second half of the evening was devoted to Shostakovich’s tenth symphony, a performance that the program predicted would last 57 minutes. Josep Vincent’s tempo at the start and end of the first movement and the start of the fourth was slow, very much slower than the overall moderato of movement one’s marking. This gave the performance weight and a psychological intensity that brought the composer’s internal struggles to the fore to great effect. The balance, of course, was achieved by playing the first movement’s central outburst significantly quicker than moderately.

The scherzo was a gnashing snarl, exactly as it should be. But when the symphony is played in this way, the third movement is transformed into perhaps the emotional centre of the work. This music becomes wholly personal, probably a neurotic’s plea to be noticed as an imagined waltz is shared with a certain Elvira in what can only be a musical dream. And then, after a return to the continuing darkness, we suddenly go to the circus and meet tumbling clowns pulling faces at us, or perhaps mocking a recently deceased dictator. The performance was not only vivid, but also brilliantly interpretive. Everything made sense here.

The evening and the season finished with a rip-roaring Marquez Danzon No2 and the audience went home impatient for the start of the new season.