Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonia under Paavo Järvi with Maria Dueñas in Schubert and Bruch

When you have been to a lot of concerts - when you reach a certain age! - real surprises are quite rare. Even new works fall into expected groups when you have heard a lot of them. In over fifty years of concert-going, I cannot remember a performance of Schubert’s Symphony No. 1, let alone a concert with Schubert’s Symphony No. 2 on the same programme.  Surprise? Will it come from a program advertising Schubert and Bruch? Well, yes, if it also includes the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonia Bremen with Paavo Järvi with Maria Dueñas as soloist.

Let’s start with the Schubert symphonies. Number one had his first performance some seventy years after it was written in 1813. During his lifetime, Franz Schubert heard little of his music performed before a paying audience. This is immediately one in the eye for anyone who justifies taste via popularity. Here we have perhaps the greatest European composer of all time who managed to have just a handful of his works performed in public during his lifetime. A populist would have to declare him and his work worthless. Things were obviously different at the start of the nineteenth century. But is public exposure any easier now? At the start of the nineteenth century, Schubert could at least invite his friends to a recital. Salons were all the rage. In the twenty-first century, how many unhittable videos are posted on the Internet? And are they all bad? Conversely, it what gets the hits automatically good?

The first symphony was the work of a sixteen-year-old. And yet it sounds mature, in spite of orchestral writing that on occasions advertises immaturity and lack of experience. But what is in the work is the unusual mixture of dance and celebration with dark self-doubt that would come to characterise the composer’s later works. The work runs to half an hour and feels like a deliberately serious statement by a young man who knew he had talent, but still could not see a definitive way to express it. Would things change?

After the break, we also had a performance of Schubert's Symphony No. 2. This is surprising music, along with the First Symphony, but there is greater maturity in the writing. The sound world seems to be that Mendelssohn, rather than Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven. But Schubert wrote his first two symphonies in 1813 and 1814 to 1815 a decade before Mendelssohn wrote anything of note. I remain wedded to the idea that no one is ever born before their time. A public, however, can become fixed in a culture that prevents it from appreciating the novel, however, and that tendency can render some creative geniuses to appear to be ahead of the time. So it probably was with Schubert. Unknown and unheard, he was already writing revolutionary music a decade at least before it became institutionalized by Mendelssohn. This time, these early symphonies by Schubert formed the real surprise of this concert.

Bruch’s First Violin Concerto is never a surprise. Unless, that is, it is played by someone like Maria Dueñas. No matter what reputation precedes, perfect artistry transforms even the most familiar music into something unique and even surprising.

María Dueñas pulled everything out of this music. Too often a piece like Bruch’s concerto is played for its populist kudos, with all the edges shaved to smooth, presented to pacify an expectant crowd rather than energise them. Maria Dueñas gave it everything, often attacking phases with a confidence that I personally have not heard before. Isn’t it amazing when something so familiar can be transformed by performance into a complete surprise. Brava!

In total, the ADDA audience demanded and received three encores, two from María Dueñas, and one from the orchestra. The orchestral offering at the end was the Andante Festivo of Sibelius. Like the Valse Triste, this piece ostensibly offers a celebration in a minor key promoting reflection. It is a beautiful piece, amplified by its understatement. Maria Dueñas gave two encores, one solo, and one with the orchestral strings. The first was an arrangement of Fauré’s Après Un Rêve, which was, after the Bruch concerto, sweet on sweet. Then, solo, she gave a performance of Applemania by Igudesman which, on the face of it, is a show-off piece designed for competitions. In the hands of María Dueñas, it was music, simply beautiful music.

Pinchas Zuckerman with the Sinfonia Varsovia in Penderecki, Schubert and Beethoven – a real delicacy

The word “delicacy” can mean many things. It can signify refinement in a personality, something good to eat, or describe something too fragile to handle. Situations can be delicate, also, and perhaps Pinchas Zuckerman, despite his many years of the peak of his musical and performing powers, felt that last night’s concert in Alicante qualified as a rather “delicate” occasion.

The Sinfonia Varsovia’s advertised conductor, Tatsuya Shomono, had to cancel his leadership of this concert, which had originally planned a performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, after the first half when Pinchas Zuckerman would play the Beethoven violin concerto. But the conductor was ill and could not travel. So Pinchas Zuckerman picked up the baton as well. Or, rather, he didn’t, because he didn’t use one!

A change of program saw the Beethoven Concerto moved to the second half, and the new first half presented works by Penderecki and Schubert. The Sinfonia Varsovia string players opened the evening with Penderecki’s Chaconne In Memoriam Pope John Paul II. And they played it without a conductor, with apparently all the delicate communication skills of a chamber ensemble. Delicate also applied to the music, which seemed to examine, and then re-examine feelings of loss. Played thus, seemingly without active direction, save for a gesture, or a bow stroke from the lender, the Penderecki Chaconne began this evening in a thoroughly original way, though quietly, without show, with delicacy.

Pinchas Zuckerman then conducted Schubert’s Symphony No. 5. In this work, a young Schubert takes his compositional lead from Mozart and Haydn. The music exudes control, form, structure and process, rather paroxysms of emotion. And, as such, it worked beautifully, allowing the orchestra again to play like a chamber group with elegance, poise and, yes, delicacy.

After the interval, Pinchas Zukerman, was soloist and director for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Now I have often heard the soloist treating this work as if it is a grandiose statement, as if every phrase needs staccato attached. And so this evening’s performance by Pinchas Zuckerman came as a real surprise, almost like a breath of fresh, delicate air. He stressed the shape and phrasing of this music and, crucially, demonstrated how the soloist blends with, interacts with, and times contradicts the orchestral accompaniment.

I first heard Pinchas Zuckeran in London’s South Bank about half a century ago and I don’t remember the concert. But I will remember this location, especially for the refined, and subtle delicacy that he brought to the music and the occasion.

Visibly tired by the end, he kept returning to the platform since the ADDA audience never wants to let anyone have an easy time. He did offer an encore, a short cradle song, to which he invited the audience to “Sing along”. It was a grand, memorable, delicate gesture.

 

Jurowski and Kavakos with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin at ADDA Alicante

There is nothing standard about performance, nothing predictable about experience, unless, of course, it is drained of all communication by an imperative to supply a product. Then, perhaps only then, strictures of form take over and dominate. And a concert program featuring Mozart’s Don Giovanni Overture, the Brahms Violin Concerto and then Schubert’s Ninth Symphony might just sound a little run-of-the-mill, highly susceptible to the kind of delivery that might pander first to audience expectations and only then to interpretation. Expectations were thus not high, though it was pleasant to be back in Alicante’s ADDA auditorium without designated vacant seats to enforce social distancing. At least we were an audience again. 

Initial impressions were that this touring Orchestra, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, would be quite small, since the chairs arranged on the stage seemed to leave significant spaces. But, at least in the scale of orchestration, none of these works approaches the grandiose, despite the fact that Schubert clearly did apply the term to his work’s duration.

On reflection, how could any concert be considered humdrum when the conductor is Vladimir Jurowski and the soloist Leonidas Kavakos?

And what about, from first note to last, the resplendent bright sound of this orchestra’s strings? They have a texture that seems sharp, in its attack, not its tonality! There seems to be an edge, for want of a better word, that shapes the phrases of the music into something much more than reproduction, much more than reading off the page. The brilliance of the sound surprises, rendering even the completely familiar into new experience. And so Mozart’s overture was suitably dramatic, but also fresh and even surprising. After a month without orchestral sound, the opening chords worked magic.

Vladimir Jurowski is tall. Leonidas Kavakos is taller. During the long orchestral introduction to the Brahms concerto, he faced the orchestra. This, surely, was no more than an indication of how much this soloist regarded the orchestra as his partner rather than as his vehicle. And the Brahms concerto is an integrated work, a true collaboration between orchestra and soloist, never a competition. The quality of shared experience was communicated perfectly by the performers and so, even in this work that the audience had heard so many times before, they collectively breathed fresh air into the auditorium. And the audience breathed freely, despite the masks. The perfection achieved on stage translated into a forty-minute performance that was received by a packed audience in complete silence, with every note registered and every phrase understood. This was communication, not mere bravura. Leonidas Kavakos offered an encore of solo JS Bach and, after the Brahms, the understatement was almost more intense than what had preceded it.

In some hands Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, the so-called Great C Major, can go on a bit. This performance was advertised as lasting fifty minutes, so clearly not all the repeats were played. They very rarely are.

But it must be recorded that under Jurowski’s baton, this lengthy work came across as fresh, original and committed. There was not a single note in the hour when anyone in the audience felt that this was standard repertoire being delivered with standard interpretation. This felt particularly special.

The second movement, alongside the trio section from the scherzo, could be mistaken for Mahler, almost a century early. It is worth remembering, as the program notes pointed out, that Schubert never heard the work, that it was not premiered until over a decade after its composer’s death and that, at the time, musicians who saw the work considered it is difficult, unplayable and probably many other things that they dare not say because it did not conform with their expectations. Or perhaps, given a modern analogy, they considered the effort required as being above their pay grade. This performance by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under Jurowski did reproduce a sense of freshness and originality, perhaps something like Schubert had envisaged, the sound world that mystified the composer’s contemporaries. This time the mystery was enlightening.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Claudi Arimany plays Mozart Flute Quartets and Marco Tezza plays Schubert, Janacek and Schumann

 

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the middle of October, and Alfas del Pi has three concerts in the renewed cycle of La Sociedad de Conciertos de la Música Clásica. Friday and Sunday were solo piano recitals by Marco Tezza, while on Saturday, in Casa Cultura, we heard Claudi Arimany and the Beaux Arts Trio in Mozart’s four flute quartets.

The Mozart quartets offer about an hour of music. As soloist, Claudi Arimany called the tune and chose generally fast tempi for the allegros, including the rondos. This is not demanding music, but it is pleasurably tuneful, memorably so. But there are also moments of elegance. It is this mix of the simple and sophisticated, the utterly ordered alongside elements less predictable that has maintained the popularity of Mozart’s music for over two centuries. It was a perfect opportunity for Claudi Arimany to display his unquestionable virtuosity, whilst Joaquin Palomares, David Fons and Gonzalo Meseguer, the members of the Beaux Arts Trio, played their substantial part.

The two piano recitals by Marco Tezza presented the Alfas audience with something of a challenge. The Friday programme was Schubert’s Sonata in B flat D960 coupled with In The Mists by Leos Janacek, whilst on Sunday he repeated the Schubert, but coupled it with Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe, opus 133.

Schubert’s last sonata for piano is a challenging work under any hands. It is one of the longest piano sonatas ever written and its deceptively light textures often give way to dark, depressed corners of the human psyche as its composer contemplated what was to prove a fatal illness and an approaching death that was only weeks in the future. And, given he had suffered symptoms for several years, he was certainly aware of the process.

The work’s tempi markings are possibly ambiguous, but most pianists stick at least roughly to the broad moderato of the first movement in the even broader andante of movement two. But the first movement is moderato qualified by the composer with “molto” and the andante of the second with “sostenuto”. The mind could spend quite some time working out how to be “very” moderate or indeed how walking maybe “sustained”, other than by not actually stopping.

Now it appears that most pianists interpret the first movement’s pace at the allegro end of moderato and the second’s andante towards adagio. The notable exception to this pattern was Sviatoslav Richter, whose YouTube performance of the piece from 1972 is timed at over forty-seven minutes, with the opening moderato running to twenty-four minutes. Most performances, however, do not run to such lengths. Alfred Brendel, for instance, albeit ignoring a repeat or two, could deliver the work in just over thirty-five minutes.

Imagine, then, the level of surprise when, preparing to introduce the concert, Marco Tezza asked me to request that there should be no applause between movements because the piece would last no less than fifty-five minutes. And it did. I would not have been surprised if he had said thirty-five minutes. I would have questioned forty-five, but fifty-five just passed over me, so unexpected it precluded reaction.

And it was the first two movements that stretched time. Rather than a life story told at a story-teller’s pace, the movement became an autobiographical reflection, a series of questions, perhaps from a dying composer’s rambling diary, all of which led to the repetition of “Did I deserve this?” It is a work I have heard hundreds of times, but Marco Tezza’s performance was immediately something different when, at the end of the opening phrase, I became conscious for the first time that there is a clashing semitone in the harmony. The second movement became a long bout of self-pity, interspersed with what came across as memories, telling of better times in the past that contrasted ever more bleakly with the dark present.

Movements three and four were more conventional, but because of what had preceded them, they took on the sense of denials, expressing an inability to face up to the reality that had demanded attention in the first two.

I admit that after the Friday concert I was not convinced. After Sunday’s concert when he repeated the work, I was. It’s an approach that will not replace the existing B-flat sonata in my head but will now live forever alongside it as a different take on what had become the composer’s uncomfortable reality. And, by the way, the Janacek In The Mists on Friday night and the Schumann Gesänge der Frühe on Sunday both contributed to and indeed emphasized the feeling of introspection. On both occasions, we were sent home with a little encore, Chauncey Olcott’s arrangement of My Wild Irish Rose, played, believe it or not, very slowly and introspectively. Music is a very powerful language, especially when understated.

 

Schubert and his work – Herbert Francis Peyser

Schubert and his work – Herbert Francis Peyser turns out to be a short and simple account of Schubert’s life. Given when the book was written, there is no surprise that the concept of venereal disease did not raise its head in the entire piece. It was alluded to, but there was not even a nudge or a wink in the text. The final diagnosis became typhus. Some interesting points:

·         father- parsimonious, poor, haughty

·         father taught son

·         child handed over to a local teacher who drank too much

·         father chucked him out for a while

·         conscription was avoided by studying

·         often careless with his work (though not deliberately)

·         hint of homosexuality

·         “You squander your thoughts without developing them”

·         Would not eat for several days at the end