Memorable? You bet! Joe Alessi plays Chick Corea’s trombone Concerto at ADDA, Alicante

The word memorable is much overused. It now tends to signify something that is rather bland, an experience unworthy of being labelled “world class”, “incredible”, “iconic” or some other meaningless malapropism. And if something is truly memorable, how long would we expect that memory to last? A minute? An hour? A lifetime?

Last night’s concert in ADDA, Alicante, was memorable. Its music alongside its experience will live in my own memory for the rest of my life. And it won’t be at the level of a distancing or fading recollection. This musical experience will forever be vivid, enhanced by Chick Corea’s wholly original score, and Joe Alessi’s skilled and committed playing.

Trombone concertos have been pretty thin on the ground until recent years. That is strange, because the instrument, also known as the sackbut, has been an orchestral feature for many centuries. In the past, of course, before the technological enhancements of the last two centuries, the instrument might have been used purely primarily for volume and had a reputation for clumsiness. A change of key might even need a different instrument. No more.

Chick Corea was a famous performer. His most familiar style was jazz, performing as a soloist or alongside the great names of the musical language. Chick Corea the bandleader and improviser we know from recordings, but Chick Corea the composer is less well-known. The trombone concerto that Joe Alessi commissioned from him turned out to be his last composition. Chick Corea apparently wanted to end the work quietly, but Joe Alessi plucked up the courage to ask him to change approach and up the excitement at the end. One would never have known there had been any change, so wonderfully did the work communicate its intentions.

What was so striking about the music was its apparently complete originality. Every phrase seemed to exist in a sound world new to the audience, to explore sonorities that even a concert goer with almost a lifetime of memories found not only surprising but striking. And these textures, generally, were delivered at a whisper, never a shout. Yes, there were jazz idioms, but there was also Charles Ives here (perhaps also walking around New York) and Copeland, amongst others. Presented as a stroll, followed by a couple of dances, punctuated by a little anguish, the music promised a relaxed meandering around tonal centres. But Chick Corea’s rhythms, let alone his harmonies, are rarely predictable. Rhythms break, and there are hooks sticking out that catch you as you pass. The listener is constantly lulled into assured familiarity only to be presented with sonorities and trips that keep the concentration fixed on where the next step might fall. The dances and the strolls therefore force you to notice everything, because it may trip you up.

Memorable it was. It’s a work and a performance that will live in the mind as long as I do, not least because of Joe Alessi’s wonderful performance. It was not just virtuoso. It was committed in a way that communicated his obvious and complete love of the piece. And the ADDA audience in its entirety shared the emotion and commitment of all of the performers, who, collectively, and Joel, Alessi in particular, made their work and our evening so utterly memorable.

Joe Alessi played what he described as a love song as an encore, perfect he said, for a daybreak stroll along Alicante’s waterfront. And then, buy popular request, we heard the coda from Chick Corea’s concerto a second time, its high note ending asking the soloist to work hard again. I am sure it was a labour of love.

The rest of the concert will live alongside the memories. Mussorgky’s Night on a Bare Mountain opened the evening. The unconventional music of Mussorgsky was revelatory, if not, always competent or coherent. The piece, however, is a complete success in its orchestral version. Not all visionaries of capable of perfection, as Repin’s portrait of the composer graphically illustrates. There is a lot going on.

And in the second half, we were presented with what promised to be the main event in the form of a performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet, alongside a film by Lukas van Woerkum, which offered a suitably silent, balletic re-interpretation of the fairytale. The effect was spectacular, but personally, I found that the visual sometimes caught me not listening to the music. As ever, the ADDA orchestra under Josep Vicent played faultlessly and the interpretation was nothing less than both faithful and spectacular. The film did make me listen to the piece in a different way. It was memorable effect, however, on a memorable evening.

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!