Gregorio Nieto plays Saint-Saens Cello Concerto alongside Tchaikovsky in an ADDA concert that approaches perfection

I normally start my concert reviews by focusing on the programme, then the performance and then the personalities. This time I want to reverse the order and start with the performers, or at least one particular performer.

Josep Vicent is artistic director of the ADDA auditorium and the conductor of its orchestra. For many years, he has worked hard throughout the Valencian region to raise standards of playing and performance. First with the Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra and subsequently with ADDA, he has worked tirelessly to achieve perfection of programming and performance that the audiences in ADDA currently enjoy. The scale of his achievement in Alicante surely ranks alongside Rattle in Birmingham or Dudamel in Caracas. Now, the sense of anticipation felt collectively by ADDA audiences is tangible. Every concert is not merely an event, it is a guaranteed memory for life. After over fifty years of concert going, I look forward to the ADDA experience in a way that recent visits to world famous venues cannot match. Congratulations to Josep Vicent for having the vision, talent, and persistence to make it happen, for the achievement is primarily his, though the ADDA orchestra that you created still owns the playing!

Last night’s programme provides a perfect example of the quality we have come to take for granted. At first sight, there is nothing particularly special. A Tchaikovsky Symphony, Saint-Saens’s Cello Concerto No. 1, and then Tchaikovsky’s popular favourite, the Fantasy Overture, Romeo and Juliet.

Now this last piece is so widely played and known that it might be hard to say something new about it. Personally, I first heard this over sixty years ago and my enthusiasm for it is undiminished. To call it a masterpiece is to belittle it. The perfect blend of conflict, falling in love and tragedy of the story is beautifully drawn by its composer, who both understood the play and knew how to create music to convey meaning. The transitions in this piece are apparently seamless, but they happen suddenly enough to keep the audience surprised, as well as charmed, even if the work is familiar to them. No matter how many times one hears this piece, it works the same every time.

It does, however, need to be played properly and with commitment. As has happened so often with very well-known music, musicians and conductors often rely on familiarity for effect so the performance itself becomes perfunctory. This was not the case last night with the ADDA orchestra under Josep Vicent’s direction. Both and interpretation were perfect and in under twenty minutes, the whole of Shakespeare’s drama played out before us. More Tchaikovsky followed. More swans, we were told, as the orchestra offered an encore of music from Swan Lake. The reference to “more swans” came after Gregorio Nieto had chosen Saint-Saens’s The Swan for his own personal encore after the work that proceeded Romeo and Juliet.

The work in question was Saint-Saens’s First Cello Concerto and Gregorio Nieto’s playing of it was a virtuosic, vivid and utterly communicative. It was the kind of concerto where the soloist and orchestra engage in musical dialogue, without obvious cadenzas where the soloist plays alone. This assumes sufficient orchestral skill on behalf of the composer to facilitate that dialogue and sufficient skill on the part of the performers to remain aware of the required balance. This is therefore difficult music to perform and last night soloist alongside the virtuosic ADDA orchestra under Josep Vicent gave a faultless interpretation. The experience was memorable.

As was the opening work in the concert. Josep Vicent has championed Tchaikovsky’s symphonies over the years and has given multiple performances of the equally famous numbers four, five and six. But this was number two, the Little Russian. It is a symphony that is performed less than the famous three, but on this evidence, the Little Russian should be a concert hall standard. The enthusiasm encapsulated in the writing of the finale alone might render it a permanent favourite.

The symphony was a complete success: a success in terms of performance because the ADDA orchestra gave an exciting and perfect rendition of it, and it was a success of programming by Josep Vicent. The performance, and indeed the whole concert was utterly memorable, which in the end presented three pieces by Tchaikovsky alongside two by Saint-Saens. The concert was entitled Conexión Latina II, in recognition of the evening’s soloist being Venezuelan, but a more apt title could have been Esencia del Romanticismo, since the three works on the programme were all composed in the 1860s and 1870s, so our experience was concentrated on a very short period of musical history. What a masterpiece of programming! It was musically perfect.

 

ADDA under Josep Vicent in Saint-Saens and Strauss, with Daniel Oyarzabal, Amanda Forsyth and Pinchas Zuckerman

Stars shine brightly and that shining can cover immense distances. Their light travels in straight lines, unless there is, as Einstein described, another immense mass nearby – perhaps another star, and then it curves. The star of Saint-Saens’s Symphony No. 3 is the organ. It is even known as the Organ Symphony, despite the fact that the organ is silent for most of the work’s duration, and the fact that the organ part is largely written to enhance the power of the orchestral tutti. It does come to the fore briefly in the slow movement, but, if it is then a star, it burns out quite quickly. Precisely why the composer also included a piano in the orchestration still baffles me, because the piano’s contribution could so easily have been achieved differently, for instance, by pizzicato in the strings.

And it’s not that this star had to shine from afar. The ADDA auditorium does not have an organ, and, occasionally, when an organ was obligato for a given piece, an electric variety was shipped in. But these were Baroque pieces with organ continuo, with none of the blazing fortés that the Saint--Saens demanded.

It is about a kilometre from the ADDA auditorium to Alicante Cathedral and it was that church’s organ which was played by Daniel Oyarzabal and relayed live in projection on the back wall of the stage. The technical feat in accomplishing this was huge. And it was a resounding success, although I did detect a slight delay in the organ part, not because of the playing, obviously, but because of the inherent latency of the electronics. The speed of light is immense, but a delay of just the smallest fraction of a second alongside tutti at near presto tempo is discernible.

Not that this shortcoming affected the quality of the performance, which was truly wonderful. Personally, I prefer the first movement punchier, but this more romantic reading made perfect and lyrical sense. It was an immense achievement for all concerned, not least for the ADDA orchestra, who had a quite superb evening.

Speaking of brilliance being a little curved when another massive source is nearby, the evening began with a beautifully played Don Quixote of Richard Strauss. Amanda Forsyth’s cello played the delusional but lovable Quixote and her husband, Pinchas Zuckerman, chipped in on the witty viola as Sancho Panza. Not only were the orchestral textures exquisite, but the storytelling came to the fore in this performance via Josep Vicent’s reading. The orchestral detail achieved by this combination of conductor and orchestra was at times breathtaking, most of all in the slower, quieter passages where the composer juxtaposed widely varied sonorities. There is perhaps not enough of a role for the viola to regard it as a soloist’s spot, but Amanda Forsyth’s cello shone out when alone and played along with the orchestral part when not otherwise engaged.

What was utterly clear in this concert was that the players who comprise the ADDA orchestra love both the music and its challenges, and they adore playing together. The sense of camaraderie and cooperation is palpable, and this shines through anything they touch to enhance the audience’s musical experience. This is surely now one of the great orchestras, a true star.