Costa Blanca Arts Update - Marin Alsop, Kian Soltani and Vienna RSO play Eisendle, Schumann and Dvorak in ADDA

 

It’s hard to describe what a complete success this concert was. For the first time I have heard Marin Alsop conduct a live concert. I expected superlatives. I got much better than that. She is not one to show off. She is not one to grab the spotlight. But what she does is completely professional and carefully thought out. She is such an expert at what she does that her contribution seemed transparent, shunning attention that would always be better focused on the music, itself.

With a programme like this, with a new work which has been commissioned by the orchestra from a young composer, one would expect it to be delivered with care and attention, otherwise what was the point? Hannah Eisendle’s website indicates that she is interested in music for film and theatre. Well it showed, and advantageously. In under seven minutes, Heliosis visited Bartok’s Sonata for two pianos, Shostakovich’s string tones, a touch of Rite of Spring here and there and probably much more. But this was not mere pastiche. This was musically impressionistic, a series of pictures flashing through sound to make a satisfying and surprising journey.

But what more can one say about the rest of the programme? In an age where originality is seen as an essential right, or perhaps rite, and where it is so often absent, what can an orchestra and a soloist do with two mainstays of the mainstream repertoire?

Well, one can start and finish by delivering performances that are judged, faithful and at the same time exciting, because what is on offer is of great, enduring quality. One can also fail, of course, and fall short of the possibilities that these great composers have offered. But when the conductor is Marin Alsop and the soloist is Kian Soltani then nothing less than perfection is almost guaranteed.

Schumann’s Cello Concerto is a staple of the repertoire, one of perhaps three concerti for the instrument that every cellist must learn. It is also therefore a piece whose vitality and freshness can be hard to recreate. Kian Soltani’s interpretation, however, was both vital and fresh, but also it was tense where conflict surfaced and lyrical where tenderness appeared. It was certainly far more than a mere performance of standard repertoire. Such playing reopens a listener’s interest in a work, allowing it to be approached anew, as if for the first time. It takes more than technical virtuosity to achieve that. His encore was a Ukrainian folksong with a miniature but utterly delicate orchestral commentary. It delighted everyone, not just the much-applauded resident Ukrainian contingent.

And what of Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony? Again one must be faithful to the score, but there is always great space to fall short. I always feel that the lines in Dvorak’s music should stand out. Where we start and finish as listeners in such music should feel like a journey, not a slide show. And of course Marin Alsop’s reading of the score created the momentum that drove the travel and of course the audience was totally in step.

The two encores were similar in concept, but diverse in style. A nineteenth century romp of a dance from the orchestra’s home city was followed by a modern parody of the same idea, just to ensure that no-one took anything too seriously. As we had already been reminded, there were other things happening in the world.

Memorias de mis putas tristes by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez may have invented magical realism, a writing style that stresses realism in language to the extent that images become amplified, perhaps stretched, or recoloured. The resulting hyper-reality can be seen by some readers as dream-like or exaggerated, when it merely reflects an enhanced sensitivity of awareness. The effect on the reader can be astounding, arresting, like free association with imagination nailed to the spot of the present. If such a reader is convinced, the feeling is that of being incorporated into the events, drawn in, albeit passively, into an experience that is involving and constantly surprising. There can, however, be challenges with experience that “takes you there”, rather than relates or describes in a more detached way.

In his novel, Memorias de mis putas tristes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez seems, at first glance, to have applied this stylistic technique to the book’s scenario, itself. A reader is immediately plunged into a place they might have thought they would never go and, if one is to experience this story, one has to remain in that role for the duration, which, in the case of this book, is not very long.

We meet a journalist. We experience life from his perspective, very much from within his experience. His perspective throughout is that we are sharing this life, living it alongside his old age and we suddenly seem to know him well. He is just turning ninety years old: this we know. His mind, clearly, remains acute: this, also, we know from the start. We also realise that he must still be in possession of other faculties that might have burned out in a man of his age, because he announces early on that he is about to celebrate his achievement of another decade by paying to deflower a fourteen-year-old girl. Arrangements are ongoing. The girl needs the money, at least her family does. It seems she, herself, does not expect to profit, though clearly others will. It’s a business arrangement, no more, no less. And hence, we the readers, are “being taken there”.

But, for the first time in his long life, the old man finds himself in love. At ninety, and in circumstances where the transaction was to be no more than contractual, he finds himself involved, emotionally as well as physically. He begins to imagine a permanence in this relationship, a permanence that would begin at the age of ninety.

We learn a little of the journalist’s past and his professional status. We learn more of the present social conditions of the town where he lives. But this is not a long, analytical novel. On the contrary, it is short, more of a short story, and so we find that we do not have to inhabit this persona for many pages. But the experience is revealing and not a little moving.

As to meaning? Interpretation? The reality that presents itself demands our free association remains rooted to the protagonist’s spot. We have no choice. This is not me, the reader, but magically a reader of this novel shares a vivid reality that probably would never have been imagined.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Through the emotions – Soler, Valero and Gandía at ADDA in Alicante

Gala Lirica, Opera Gala or merely Song Medley often labels an admixture of showcase snippets, offered, it seems, primarily to advertise a voice or commemorate a venue. Too often these evenings degenerate into a succession of star turns, offering world-stopping climaxes every three minutes or so, with each old chestnut being greeted with the audience’s enthusiasm merely because it is recognized. One is reminded of the occasions where the star is applauded over the top of the music, making it inaudible, merely because the song has been included.

At its best, this format can offer a memorable evening of fine singing that, via its very brevity, reminds an audience of a multitude of bigger experiences. At its very best, a judgment that would apply to the evening offered by Lorena Valero and Antonia Gandía in Alicante, fine voices deliver superb music and just enough acting and characterization to offer meaning without excess sentimentality. It is often an excess of false emotion that often renders these occasions less than memorable, but the right amount, as here in Alicante, adds to the experience.

These two voices, the mezzo of Lorena Valero and the superb, dramatic tenor of Antonio Gandía gave a mixed program of well-known set pieces from grand opera and, perhaps for many in this audience, a set of pieces from the less well-known world of Spanish Zarzuela. It was a world that was well known, obviously, to the two singers and especially to the conductor, Cristobal Soler, who regularly presents this genre in Madrid’s Zarzuela Theatre.

The format was clear, orchestra, solo, solo, duo and repeat. Juxtaposed with Verdi, von Flotow and Gounod, one is reminded just how unique is the sound world of Puccini. Delilah’s aria from Saint-Saens’s Samson and Delilah and Lippen Schweigen from Lehar’s Merry Widow brought the opera half to close.

After the interval, the Zarzuela began with Chueca, Marqués and Sorozábal, whose sound world is itself very sophisticated. Moreno Torroba featured large, as did Jiménez’s famous Luis Alonso Intermezzo. Fernández Caballero’s El Dúo de la Africana brought the evening to a close, but there was always going to be an encore, which was Me Llamas Rafelillo from Penella’s El Gato Montés, sung in Valenciano to the audience’s delight.

Throughout, the ADDA Simfonica played their part to perfection, as ever, with the brass especially resplendent. Loreno Valero’s voice, always accurate and never forced, coped well with some testing moments. Antonia Gandía’s tenor is a great voice throughout its vocal and dynamic range. And both singers communicated superbly with their fellow musicians, one another, and with their audience. It was an evening that went through the emotions, from love to regret, from anger to sympathy, from playfulness to aggression and ultimately to joy. These occasions often go only through the motions, but this Soler, Valero, Gandía and ADDA combination made this a night to remember.

The Fugitive by Marcel Proust

 

Reaching the end of The Fugitive, volume six of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu, I begin to realise – not quite at last – how modern an experience he relates. Couched in the language and setting of a privilege we now associate with centuries past, the author eventually creates an utterly absurd world, in which nothing, not even the wealth of these wealthy people, is real. Assumptions of rightness or permanence, qualities of which their opinions positively reek, are thus laid bare as momentary invention, ephemeral, as trustworthy as a lie and as dependable as froth.

I am also reminded of William Shakespeare’s words spoken via the mouth of a fictional King Richard the Second:

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am…

Is it possible for an individual simultaneously to feel like a king and a beggar? Can it be possible for someone to be revered, even considered a direct descendant of God one moment and then derided, drowned in wine the next, or even starved to death by those who once worshipped his very presence? Not even history can agree what constitutes the past, the only incontestable fact being death itself, the life that preceded it forever remaining negotiable. The rich and powerful, after all, have further to fall, so there can be interpretable bounces along the way.

A young man has chosen a liaison with a young woman. How original is that? One is the narrator and the other is called Albertine. This is, after all, fiction, though it claims to be a record of memory. They are not married. In the society they inhabit, this can be a problem. People, after all, may start to think… And then who is to say whether they will stay faithful to one another, true to themselves, or even agree which self, the public, the private or the invented will prevail? And what about the “preferences” of the young lady? Might they be questioned? Of course, they might.

Proust seems to have been keenly aware of this transmutability of the self. For if it was not in itself anything real, if it depended upon the successive form of the hours in which it had appeared to me, a form which remained that of my memory as the curve of the projections of my magic lantern depended upon the curve of the coloured slides, did it not represent in its own manner a truth, a thoroughly objective truth too, to wit that each one of us is not a single person, but contains many persons who have not all the same moral value and that if a vicious Albertine had existed, it did not mean that there had not been others, she who enjoyed talking to me about Saint-Simon in her room, she who on the night when I had told her that we must part had said so sadly: "That pianola, this room, to think that I shall never see any of these things again" and, when she saw the emotion which my lie had finally communicated to myself, had exclaimed with a sincere pity: "Oh, no, anything rather than make you unhappy, I promise that I will never try to see you again." Then I was no longer alone. I felt the wall that separated us vanish. And so, by recognising that she existed as several, contrasting but simultaneous people, the narrator sets his Albertine, the object of his desires, into a form that creates displeasure. This role displeases her, because it makes him unhappy and the solution is not to see him again, the state that precisely neither of them actually wants. Or so we are told…

But were they both lying? Or just one of them? And, when we are truly honest with ourselves, how many of us can actually be sure of who we are or, indeed, what we desire? Is that which we claim to desire just a momentary association of the self we want to project, a passing whim we can adopt to convince others we do, in fact, possess character? Is the goal of public persona to create fake news, a false narrative of identity, whose only test is whether we might market it so others might buy it? Albertine might indeed exist in my memory only in the state in which she had successively appeared to me in the course of her life, that is to say subdivided according to a series of fractions of time, my mind, re-establishing unity in her, made her a single person, and it was upon this person that I sought to bring a general judgment to bear, to know whether she had lied to me, whether she loved women, whether it was in order to be free to associate with them that she had left me. What the woman in the baths would have to say might perhaps put an end for ever to my doubts as to Albertine's morals. But was that woman in the baths telling a truth?

And then, when we have created that desired image and projected it, does it still represent the individual that created it? Time passes, and gradually everything that we have said in falsehood becomes true; I had learned this only too well with Gilberte; the indifference that I had feigned when I could never restrain my tears had ended by becoming real; gradually life, as I told Gilberte in a lying formula which retrospectively had become true, life had driven us apart. I recalled this, I said to myself: "If Albertine allows an interval to elapse, my lies will become the truth. And now that the worst moments are over, ought I not to hope that she will allow this month to pass without returning? If she returns, I shall have to renounce the true life which certainly I am not in a fit state to enjoy as yet, but which as time goes on may begin to offer me attractions while my memory of Albertine grows fainter."

And if we create the projection of our intentions, passing though they may be, does it deliver what we conceived? Or are we perceived as the incompetently delivered amalgam of our intentions? "Oh, no. Monsieur, it doesn't do to cry like that, it isn't good for you." And in her attempt to stem my tears she shewed as much uneasiness as though they had been torrents of blood. Unfortunately I adopted a chilly air that cut short the effusions in which she was hoping to indulge and which might quite well, for that matter, have been sincere. Her attitude towards Albertine had been, perhaps, akin to her attitude towards Eulalie, and, now that my mistress could no longer derive any profit from me, Francoise had ceased to hate her. She felt bound, however, to let me see that she was perfectly well aware that I was crying, and that, following the deplorable example set by my family, I did not wish to 'let it be seen.' "You mustn't cry, Monsieur," she adjured me, in a calmer tone, this time, and intending to prove her own perspicacity rather than to shew me any compassion. And she went on: "It was bound to happen; she was too happy, poor creature, she never knew how happy she was."

And is fact not just another variety of fiction? …such is the cruelty of memory. At times the reading of a novel that was at all sad carried me sharply back, for certain novels are like great but temporary bereavements, they abolish our habits, bring us in contact once more with the reality of life, but for a few hours only, like a nightmare, since the force of habit, the oblivion that it creates, the gaiety that it restores to us because our brain is powerless to fight against it and to recreate the truth, prevails to an infinite extent over the almost hypnotic suggestion of a good book which, like all suggestions, has but a transient effect. You see, nothing, not even fiction, lasts.

And how much are we influenced by whim? Are our beliefs true merely because we want to believe them? Are we really capable ever of being objective? Moreover, with the minute observation of people whose lives have no purpose, they would discern, one after another, in the people with whom they associated, the most obvious merits, exclaiming their wonder at them with the artless astonishment of a townsman who on going into the country discovers a blade of grass, or on the contrary magnifying them as with a microscope, making endless comments, taking offence at the slightest faults, and often  applying both processes alternately to the same person. In Gilberte's case it was first of all upon these minor attractions that the idle perspicacity of M. and Mme. de Guermantes was brought to bear: "Did you notice the way in which she pronounced some of her words?" the Duchess said to her husband after the girl had left them; "it was just like Swann, I seemed to hear him speaking." "I was just about to say the very same, Oriane." "She is witty, she is just like her father." "I consider that she is even far superior to him. Think how well she told that story about the sea-bathing, she has a vivacity that Swann never had." "Oh! but he was, after all, quite witty." "I am not saying that he was not witty, I say that he lacked vivacity," said M. de Guermantes in a complaining tone, for his gout made him irritable, and when he had no one else upon whom to vent his irritation, it was to the Duchess that he displayed it. But being incapable of any clear understanding of its causes, he preferred to adopt an air of being misunderstood.

And in the final analysis, which, if we retain any faith in Christian salvation never happens, and, if we do not, happens all the time, we may just realise that the whole basis of what we did, the entire moral compass we imposed, the emotional standpoint we adopted, was born of misunderstanding, deception and misinterpretation. So, where are we? Certainly not in any dependable heaven, ever, but forever in life, simultaneously the ruler, the king of what we project and the beggar of how we are received.

Costa Blanca arts update - No superlatives - L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Alicante with Jonathan Nott and Emmanuel Pahud play Ibert and Mahler

 

There are insufficient superlatives to describe the experience. L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Alicante under Jonathan Nott played Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Ibert’s Flute Concerto with Emmanuel Pahud a soloist so perfectly that ratings and comparisons simply do not apply. When music is this good, it is useless trying to say ‘how’ good it was. The playing transcended descriptions of technique, superseded mere sound and attained a perfection that can only be labelled ‘communication’.

Ibert’s syncretic mix of neo-classicism, humour, jazz and surrealism was so expertly played by Emmanuel Pahud that his virtuosity was almost immediately taken for granted by his audience. Once achieved, that level of experience progresses into a changed awareness where the music is absorbed and known, rather heard or learned. Emmanuel Pahud seemed to invite everyone to participate rather than merely receive. One doubts whether in the packed auditorium there was a single person who did not feel that this was anything other than a personal experience.

And so, when presented with what, it must be said, was probably an unknown work from an under-performed composer, that packed audience found absolutely no barrier of unfamiliarity between themselves and appreciation. Like all concertos, Ibert’s Flute Concerto offers a soloist an opportunity to show off, but here the virtuosic witticism engaged the crowd rather than simply impressed it.

Emmanuel Pahud communicated with the orchestral players, but he also seemed to engage the listeners directly. He was a soloist whose complete mastery of the music and his instrument created something that transcended performance and created genuinely shared experience.

An encore, introduced to the audience’s delight in Spanish, offered a statement of solidarity with the Ukrainian people in general, but especially the soloist’s performing friends and colleagues. This was one of the Jolivet’s Incantations for solo flute, a piece from just before World War II that is prefaced by the composer’s plea a world of serene communion. It was a heart-felt and wholly appropriate message on this dark day.

In his fifth symphony, Gustav Mahler seems eventually to have approached a state of optimism, certainly ecstasy. It is a work best known for its smallest part, the adagietto, a fourth movement that is often both played extracted and often murdered in performance. Its celebrity can too easily dominate, can become the focus, and thus conductors often take it too slowly, rendering its form disembodied, disjointed and meaningless. It becomes sweetness for sweetness’s sake, separate spoons of afters that ignore the identity or obscure the composition of the dish. Not here with Jonathan Nott, however. This adagio was paced towards the andante and so the lines joined into a whole that made sense. And that whole, as far as the symphony in its entirety was concerned, became the perfection that is communication.

This work in sound was read by the audience like a novel, whose complex plot found resonance, understanding and empathy. The biting contrasts of the second movement were expertly played and this movement, which can suffer from lack of direction made perfect sense. And the finale was simply unstoppable, apparently driven by its own internal momentum, the final flourish arising from its own logic, not merely tagged on as an afterthought, as can be the case. There’s simply aren’t the superlatives to do justice to the experience. Let’s just call it perfection.

As a footnote, there must be a mention for Jordi Verges Riart, whose organ recital the night before in Benidorm also delighted. Works by Pachelbel, Buxtehude, JS Bach, Vidor and Vierne were offered chronologically with the transformation and development of style both clear and powerful. It must be said, however, despite the finale of Vierne’s first organ symphony that concluded the recital, the major chord ending of Buxtehude’s G minor prelude provided the most powerful memory.

 

The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I doubt that F. Scott Fitzgerald intended that The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories should ever be published, let alone read as a single volume. This is a mix of autobiographical pieces and short stories. The distinction between the two, if not marked by physical division, would not be immediately obvious. The short stories deal with individuals trying to be somebody, unconsciously aspiring to some form of American Dream that usually only exists while these characters are awake and often dissolves into an alcoholic haze of non-achievement. The author, in the autobiographical pieces, lives a similar life, except that in his case the achievement is tangible.

Fitzgerald always seems to adopt the position of outsider looking in. He never really seems to be part of anything. Even his standpoint as a third person narrator seems more removed than is usual, as if he is reluctant to allow his characters to adopt their own voices. Not that, as an author, he imposes his own values or positions. It is more a case of his being somewhat difficult to pin down.

Perhaps this is because he was from out of town, if that town be this book’s version of New York, where much of the action takes place. The author reminds us several times that he is a mid-Westerner from St Paul, an identity and origin he seems to regard as both safe and homely when compared to the candle flame attraction of the metropolis he dared not approach too close.

There is, however, a general feeling of the persistent little guy prevailing, of the propertied, apparently privileged receiving eventual, and a highly moral, comeuppance. It’s a perspective he would use in The Great Gatsby, where the observation of a highlife from distance renders it desirable, whereas greater proximity reveals its flaws.

But this is not a coherent set of stories. They stand alone and were designed to do so. They are clearly best experienced individually and then similarities of theme and style will not confuse. Modern readers need to be aware of the fact that these stories were written about a century ago and contain some attitudes and language that today would be difficult to express in public, let alone publish.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Shostakovich 5 and Symphonie Espagnole in ADDA, Alicante

The fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich was reportedly “a Soviet artist's creative response to justified criticism”. That past criticism came as a result of official displeasure at the direction the composer’s work had taken in the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and, crucially, in the unperformed fourth symphony, a work the composer withdrew when it was in already in rehearsal. He waited twenty-five years before he eventually heard it. After a performance of this extraordinary fourth symphony under Gergiev, the audience at Alicante’s ADDA auditorium waited just two weeks to hear the fifth, the composer’s symphonic self-correction, from the ADDA orchestra under Josep Viicent.

And it was the similarities between the two apparently contrasting works that provided the most vivid memories for this listener. The fifth returns to the conventional four movements of the symphony, rather than the fourth symphony’s three. But together, the opening moderato and the scherzo are like the vast first movement of the fourth. The next movement of both symphonies form their respective emotional cores, intellectual in the fourth and self-pitying in the fifth. The finales of both works offer unconvincing apotheosis and the only major difference comes at the end. Both symphonies offer a triumphal statement of achievement in orchestral tutti and it has to be said they are both hollow and lack self-belief. But at the end of the fifth the major chords offer an apparent resolution, a statement of optimism, albeit false, whereas the fourth drifts into an agnostic cessation of existence with the merest of whimpers. Strange it seemed, however, to hear the celeste bring to an end the fifth’s first movement, albeit without the obvious question mark that concluded the fourth.

Josep Vicent’s tempo in the finale tested everyone. Originally marked as allegro non troppo, Vicent’s pace could have been described as presto. And his judgment proved memorable, because it brought to life both the urgency and impetuosity that underpins the music. By the end the ADDA string section might not have thanked him so enthusiastically, because it did make their job more taxing. A final observation must be that I have never heard this music without an error at some point amongst the French horns. This performance was therefore a first, because they were perfect.

Earlier, the audience had been treated to a performance of dazzling virtuosic communication by Leticia Moreno of the Symphonie Espagnole by Edouard Lalo. Now this is a work that wears its emotions on its sleeves. Here we are closer to Offenbach than Wagner and often refreshingly so. The solo violin part is more taxing than many concertos and there are not many bars of rest for the soloist in this five-movement work that lasts more than half an hour. The rapturous reception for Leticia Moreno’s playing was perhaps even understated because her projection of the solo part was nothing less than stunning. It was quite hard to take in such genius all at once!

And what artistic presence she displayed by playing an encore that offered musical as well as stylistic contrast. With the accompaniment of Carmen Escobar’s harp orchestrally-placed harp, Leticia Moreno gave a controlled and restrained account of Manuel de Falla’s Nana from the Popular Songs. Musically and philosophically this was almost the antithesis of the grandiloquence that had preceded it. This little encore underlined Leticia Moreno’s virtuosity. It would have been much easier had she tried again to show off. Here, less was certainly more.