Ars Alta announces the fifth Denia International Piano Festival - 19 Sept to 3 Dec 2026

 

Piano Duo Kos–Gašparović invites you to experience music at its highest level, where two exceptional artists perform with remarkable unity, virtuosity, and expressive power. Their concerts transcend the traditional recital, transforming the piano into an orchestra and every stage into a destination.

From the elegance of Beethoven to the vibrant rhythms of Spain and the evocative colours of Ravel, each program is thoughtfully crafted to inspire, captivate, and leave a lasting impression.

Whether in the world’s leading concert halls, prestigious festivals, or intimate chamber music venues, Piano Duo Kos–Gašparović offers performances that celebrate excellence, passion, and the joy of musical discovery.

Mathis Cathignol (France, 2000) is one of the most promising pianists of his generation. A graduate of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), he earned Master’s degrees in both Piano Performance and Piano Accompaniment with the highest distinction. A prizewinner at numerous international competitions, he won First Prize at the Pierre Barbizet International Piano Competition (2024) and Third Prize at the Épinal International Piano Competition (2025).

As a soloist, he has performed concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Ravel, and Stravinsky with leading orchestras, and has appeared at prestigious venues and festivals including La Roque-d’Anthéron, Salle Cortot, and Nohant. Since 2022, he has been Professor of Piano at the Claude Debussy Conservatory in Paris. Praised for the elegance of his sound and the maturity of his interpretations, Mathis Cathignol is rapidly establishing himself as one of the leading young French pianists.

Principal clarinet of the Teatro alla Scala Orchestra and Philharmonic Orchestra since 1984, Fabrizio Meloni completed his musical studies at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan. He is a winner of national and international competitions and has collaborated with internationally renowned soloists such as Bruno Canino, Alexander Lonquich, Michele Campanella, Heinrich Schiff, Friederich Gulda, Editha Gruberova, the Hagen Quartet, M.W. Chung, Philip Moll, Riccardo Muti, and Daniel Baremboim (the latter in his extraordinary capacity as pianist).

He has toured the United States and Israel with the Quintetto a Fiati Italiano. With the Nuovo Quintetto Italiano ha has toured South America and South Asia.. He has been invited to give masterclasses throughout the world. 

Defined by The New York Times “an artist with supreme technical mastery, dazzling and charming with his highly cultivated sound”, Alberto Nosè is one of the most awarded piano artists of his generation. He stood out the international music world at the age of eleven winning 1st Prize at the Jugend für Mozart International Competition in Salzburg. Top prize winner of Montecarlo Piano Masters, New York Concert Artists, Paloma O’Sheain Santander, Long-Thibaud in Paris, Maj Lind in Helsinki, Busoni in Bolzano, he was laureate at the F. Chopin International Piano Competition in 2000 which led him to a worldwide career as soloist as well as with major orchestras (London Philharmonic Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonique de Radio France, Sinfonica de Madrid) in the most renowed concert venues like Carnegie Hall in New York, Southbank Centre in London, Konzerhaus in Berlin, Théâtre du Châtelet and Salle Pleyel in Paris, Auditorium in Madrid, Mozarteum in Salzburg, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, City Hall in Hong Kong, Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, La Fenice in Venice, Santa Cecilia in Rome.

His debut album for Piano Le Magazine featuring works by Brahms, Chopin, Liszt and Prokofiev won several awards like CHOC du Monde de la Musique and La Clef by ResMusica. His CD of the Keyboard Sonatas by J. Ch. Bach, recorded on modern piano and published by Naxos, has been broadcast by Radio France, BBC 3, Radio 4 Netherland, Radio New Zealand, ABC Classic FM USA and Australia.

István I. Székely is an internationally acclaimed concert pianist, pedagogue, and distinguished representative of the Franz Liszt pianistic tradition. He is Professor of Piano at the Katarina Gurska Conservatory in Madrid and at the Franz Liszt Center for High Performance Pianists in La Nucía, Spain.

He has given masterclasses in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Turkey, Israel, Colombia, and Spain, and is regularly invited to serve on the juries of prestigious international piano competitions. As a concert pianist, he has performed throughout Spain, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Greece, Russia, Turkey, the United States, and Colombia, and has had the honor of giving a private recital for Her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol of Thailand.

He is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Dénia International Piano Festival, the Alicante International Piano Competition, and the Franz Liszt Center Piano Competition, as well as the Founder and Music Director of the Sombor Philharmonic. His artistic and pedagogical career reflects a lifelong commitment to musical excellence and the preservation of the great European piano tradition.

Programme and booking details are at https://www.arsaltacultural.com/eng/ and https://www.arsaltacultural.com/

This Side Of Paradise is a very famous novel and justly so. Its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, has been something of a blind spot for me. I read The Great Gatsby as a teenager and, frankly, was disappointed. The reaction says more about me and my age than about the book. But that was many years ago and perhaps I should revisit it.

But This Side Of Paradise was the author’s first novel and first success. It did take him many years and much revision to complete and, frankly, it shows. The style, point of view and indeed characterisation is, for me, inconsistent throughout. And what is more the mixture of forms – narrative, description and poetry, also for me, seems to flow from the writer’s need to impress and explore rather than any desire to communicate. At the same time, it feels like the writer also does not want to experiment.

Amory Blaine, the principal character, is a Midwesterner who finds himself in a private school and then Princeton. At the outset, he appears to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth as he sets about building career, love, family, and future. But life does not work out that way for him. He is repeatedly unlucky in love, finding that the women he falls for have better, far more lucrative options. His fortune, apparently considerable at the start, dwindles, until at the end of the book he is a poor man, but returning to Princeton, no doubt to pursue the academe that he had earlier apparently turned his back on.

Amory Blaine does spend time in the trenches in World War I, but he is decidedly reticent about the experience. We have no clues as to whether this is born of trauma or indifference. Perhaps the author, himself, had no direct resource to rely on since his own time in the military was spent within the USA. At the end of the novel, amid disagreements about politics, he does mention one acquaintance who was killed in the fighting, but the loss of life in the trenches, and also from the influenza epidemic that followed apparently past him by or perhaps left no lasting impression. One feels that the events that cause Amory Blaine to rethink his life and pursue different directions were precisely those that beset the writer himself.

In the first half of the book, I felt a little frustrated about the characters, who seemed to have no depth. In effect, they all seem to live in an eternal present, hardly ever referring to their collective past or harbouring ambitions or fears about the future. What emerges is a desire to conform to the ideals of the social class that they imagine they adhere to, more specifically the social class to which they aspire. If they are successful in forming facilitating liaisons, that class identity is reinforced, if not, it is questioned. Amory increasingly finds himself in the latter position, leading him inexorably towards socialism. One feels that he would not have espoused these views if he had married money, as he originally set out to do.

Amory Blaine and several of his acquaintances are heavily into literature and regularly quote and write poetry, but the efforts are late nineteenth century in style. There is no obvious modernism here. They, and the writer, are drawn towards epithets which, though in context impress, seems overdone, overwritten. Here are just two examples. Wandering through a storm one day, Amory asks himself: ‘“Who the devil is there in Ramilly County,” muttered Amory aloud, “who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?”’ Soon after a character muses: ‘Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April.’

By the end of the book, Amory declares himself a socialist, but his radicalism is couched in democratic terms, not in revolutionary and his position seems to be born of rejection by the social class he once aspired to, rather than a plea for justice in human relations. But This Side Of Paradise remains a masterpiece of its kind, a towering achievement of a young writer and is well worth reading.

Writers and their work - David Storey by John Russell Taylor

 

A difficulty with writing a critical assessment of the work of a living writer is that an author has to gamble with time. John Tussell Taylor’s monograph was published in 1974 and so concentrated on David Storey’s output in the 1960s and the early 1970s. The problem for John Russell Taylor’s work was that David Storey published in 1976 his novel Saville, which won the Booker prize that year. Now Saville is without question a towering achievement. Reading the book, as I have done several times, it almost feels like a biography of me and the hundreds of other people from industrial, northern England whose lives were quite transformed by the 1944 Education Act. For the first time access to education was both wider and more available. My own father, no doubt academically gifted, had to leave a local grammar school before doing any public qualifications simply because his parents could not afford to have him remain as a non-earner. When I entered the same school a generation later, I was automatically assigned to the same “house” into which my father had been ascribed. Saville thus described what it felt like to be socially mobile in the 1950s and 1960s, to be separated from one’s roots, to learn to speak the same language a different way, and to feel a growing sense of alienation from one’s own background. The roots were perhaps illusory throughout, as the economic and social changes of the nineteen eighties illustrated.

What John Russell Taylor does describe so well in his monograph are the David Storey works that preceded Saville. These were already a significant literary achievement. The novelist-playwright burst onto the British literary scene with hi novel This Sporting Life. It features a rugby league player called Arthur Machin in the book and renamed Frank in Lindsay Anderson’s film. As a player, he is well known locally and moderately successful, at least when he walked the streets of his local town. When a widow makes herself available to him – for whatever reason - he enters a relationship with her. There follows an examination of misogyny, sexism, social class and identity as the local hero falls from grace and has to accept failure. These are very much the threads that John Russell Taylor examines Storey’s existing work including Flight to Camden, Passmore, The Restoration of Arthur Middleton and others.

John Russell Taylor writes at the conclusion of his work: “If in his lack of reticence, his acceptance of openly expressed violence and passion as part of life and therefore, without embarrassment, as part of literature Storey seems like a maverick figure in the British literary scene, the impression is superficial. He can be seen as our first truly modern novelist because for him the traditional obstacles thrown up by middle-class education and the gentlemanly tradition of understatement are not consciously overcome; they quite simply do not exist.” This is a telling conclusion. It provides anyone with little knowledge of the circumstances in which David Story wrote a clear pointer as to how to approach his work. Access to education, the social changes that started post Word War II and the continuous rise of material prosperity really did change British society. Older values seemed to be sept aside. It also created a confusion of identity which persists, because though working-class people were admitted to and thereby created different social strata, they were never allowed to own their own identity.

As a footnote, I offer something that is unrelated to the book I am reviewing. I personally appear in the Film of This Sporting Life. In the big crowd scene filmed at Wakefield Trinity’s Belle Vue ground, I am the nine-year-old that appears for a split second behind the sticks at the scoreboard end. I was one of 28000 people who turned up to watch Wakefield beat Wigan on the way to Wembley. The score was 5-4. Fred Smith scored the try. The memory is still vivid. Also vivid was the way the crowd reacted with laughter at Richard Harris’s inability to catch the ball and number of retakes Anderson had to shoot as a result. But we were extras. The real interests were on the pitch, part of the filming. The extras are still there.

3 TV Plays by David Mercer

 

In 3 TV Plays David Mercer published the scripts of A Suitable Case For Treatment, For Tea On Sunday and And Did Those Feet. All were produced and broadcast in 1966 or before, and each one was directed by Don Taylor at the BBC. I probably watched all three plays when they were originally broadcast, no doubt accompanied by my parents initially remarking on the playwright’s origins in nearby Wakefield and then dissolving into “I don’t know why they put out this rubbish on the telly.”

But David Mercer did make an impression on me, especially the later plays On The Eve Of Publication and Let’s Murder Vivaldi, when perhaps I was more able to appreciate their subtlety. But this later work was much more conventional than these earlier plays. 

David Mercer had made his name as a playwright specifically on television, rather than the theatre. His early Where The Difference Begins had explored family relations in a working-class household in which both sons had been educated out of the class and had adopted markedly different lifestyles and politics from their father.

The plays in 3 TV plays, however, find David Mercer in a much more surreal guise, flirting, if that’s the right word, with absurdity. The reaction of my parents was apparently shared by the head of drama of the BBC when Don Taylor, the director, likened Mercer’s work to Ionesco. “Ian who?” was the reply.

A Suitable Case For Treatment is a study in marital breakdown, a situation that Mercer had himself gone through some years before. The play is darkly satirical. Morgan, the principal character, frequently has visions of hammers and sickles, and gorillas, which emphasize the unpredictability of behaviour that clearly led to the breakdown of his relationships. The TV play which reflected this darkness was wiped. The 1960s film of the same script ignores the theme to become a mere frothy comedy.

In For Tea On Sunday, three couples meet to share a gentle social occasion. Unfortunately for five of them, the sixth is what would have been labelled at the time as a “mental case”. He shows up to a London flat with an axe and breaks the place apart. The reactions of the other characters to this show of absurdity is what the play is really about.

In these two plays Mercer presents a character that does not follow conventions of behaviour. It might be argued that the author portrays himself and his personality type. In these plays, he wanted to explore what the reactions of others might be if this tendency was taken to extreme. One is reminded of his first meeting with Don Taylor where Mercer claimed he poured a cup of coffee on the carpet.

And Did Those Feet explores wildly different territory. Unlike the other two plays, the original production survives and is available on the internet. I would encourage everyone to watch it, bearing in mind that this was broadcast midweek at primetime.

And Did Those Feet is a quotation from Blake’s Jerusalem, which, in a setting by Hubert Parry, still features at the last night of the proms. For the general populace, this is a symbol of the establishment, that wall of landed gentry and their professional allies that keeps the hoi-polloi out.

A member of the landed gentry is obsessed with succession. He cannot, however, sire anything but bastards, the twins, Bernard and Timothy, who, though opposites, become inseparable. There are references to Jules et Jim, the apparent uselessness of the upper classes and their hoarding of capital. Their mother goes to live with an artist in Chelsea, who keeps her in a cage, a situation she seems to be quite happy with. In an obvious skit towards the director, a character opines that working class people send their kids to Oxford.

In And Did Those Feet, Mercer approached the surreal. Who cares what it means? There is no plot, incidentally. There is a rubbishing of the upper-class contribution to the war effort by depicting the twins lazing around in Burma. There is a swimming pool sequence where the twins swing on trapezes by candlelight. Reference to Chekov comes when they try to unsuccessfully to shoot themselves. Their father gifts them each a female doll in a coffin. The two bastards then inherit everything and go canoeing on a tributary of the Amazon. Watch it. It was of its time, but who would do something like that now?

 

Days of Vision : working with David Mercer : television drama then and now 1990 by Don Taylor

Coming from Wakefield, I have a particular interest in the work of playwright David Mercer. So it was with some excitement that I started Don Taylor’s memoir Days of Vision: working with David Mercer. In the book, Don Taylor, who directed–produced David Mercer's work for television in the early 1960s, offers far more than biography, far more than a description of a professional relationship that had the potential to change the direction that television drama might take.

Don Taylor describes his own history which took him from working class origins in West London to Oxford, and then to the BBC as a trainee. He also vividly remembers how television drama was created in those days of boom microphones and heavy cameras on wheels. It is revelatory to a twenty-first century reader to realize that many of the programmes had to be done live in the studio, because recording meant film and film meant location, and location meant expense. Anyone remotely interested in how television is made will be captivated by the author’s description of 1960s practice.

Don Taylor describes in detail a professional relationship that lasted just three years with David Mercer. What scuppered that relationship was a change within the BBC, itself, which changed the focus of television drama and effectively shut Don Taylor out of making further contributions to the medium in the way that Taylor wanted.

Mercer was himself working class, but northerner. He was different from Don Talor in that he had not been to Oxford or indeed any other prestigious university and had already been married and divorced. Both socialists, disillusioned by the 1960s, Don and David shared a political as well as a social bond. Both had been brought up by working class parents who neither appreciated nor understood either “writing” or the “theatre”.

One of the early collaborations that writer and director focused on was the play Where The Difference Begins with its themes of the death of old-style socialism, and being educated out of your class. The play eventually became the first part of Mercer’s Generations trilogy, all of which Don Taylor directed.

Quotations from Taylor about working with Mercer are jewels in the text. He says that “David Mercer’s best TV plays seem to me to rub shoulders with the best English theatre writing since the war.” The playwright’s “A Death in the Family had… an intellectual acuity about politics and political issues as they expressed themselves in conflicts between recognizable human people, that was quite new to me.” Furthermore “Mercer had … an intellectual grasp more characteristic of a European writer, a Sartre, or a Camus, or a Brecht, than any English contemporary” and that “he perceived that human beings. … have a sense of their own reality. … (Mercer’s characters) are what they believe.” He believed that “David Mercer wasn’t merely a talented new voice. He was a voice that was much needed if we were to wake up to any understanding of what kind of people we were.”

Mercer the “cuddly teddy-bear” is also here, as is his heavy drinking and his womanising. There is a priceless episode that happened at their first meeting. Unused to the middle-class flat in which Don Taylor and his wife hosted him, Mercer spilt his coffee on the carpet. Mercer later claimed he had done it on purpose.

But this professional biography is much more than a history of a collaboration. Don Taylor describes his own fall from grace in the BBC without any of the bitterness that a reader of this text will assume existed. What Taylor does do is end the book with a treatise on just how wrong the executives’ vision of television’s future had become. Writing at the end of the 1980s, Don Taylor thought that commercialism and the “low-brow” had come to dominate. One can only imagine what he would have made of the twenty-first century content-free medium, where even major sports events have to be disrupted so that advertisement can get their pounds of flesh.

As a coda to the review of Don Taylor’s Days of Vision, I set AI the task of summarizing David Reisman’s version views on US popular culture. It came up with the following: David Riesman’s view of U.S. popular culture was ambivalent rather than simply hostile. In The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman argued that modern American society was shifting from “inner-directed” people, guided by internalised family and moral standards, toward “other-directed” people, guided by peers, approval, fashion, and mass media.

For Riesman, U.S. pop culture—films, radio, magazines, advertising, children’s stories, and later television—was not just entertainment. It acted as a social tutor, teaching people how to behave, what to desire, how to fit in, and how to read the expectations of others. This made popular culture central to the formation of the modern American personality.

He worried that mass culture could encourage conformity, status anxiety, consumerism, and a dependence on social approval: the “other-directed” person wants to be liked and accepted rather than guided by firm inner convictions.

But Riesman was not simply an elitist critic of popular culture. He also saw that mass culture could widen horizons, spread information, create shared references, and give people models for imagining different lives. That helps explain why his introduction to Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society matters: U.S. popular culture could be seen as part of modernization, exposing people in traditional societies to new lifestyles, aspirations, and forms of social mobility.

In short: Riesman saw American pop culture as a powerful engine of modernization and social learning, but also as a force that could produce shallow conformity and dependence on mass-mediated approval.

In the final section of his book, Don Taylor offers a similar analysis of what happened to television. Riesman’s position very much sums up what the author thought. US popular culture was perhaps the diametric opposite of what Don Taylor wanted to achieve in his work. It is perhaps indicative of the victory of commercialism that now Don Taylor’s and David Mercer’s work is confined to obscurity, but the aesthetic achievement is still available to experience at least in part, though most of the collaborative ventures they produced were wiped years ago.

 

 

Everything turns out in the end - Turandot in Valencia with Semenchuk, Kunde and López Moreno - Sir Mark Elder conducts, Alex Ollé directs

Turandot is an operatic masterpiece. But it’s staging remains highly problematic. The two main characters, Calaf and Turandot, who does not even sing in the first act, have tour de force roles. If they cannot sing, then any production is a disaster. But the roles are very demanding and asking them to act as well is probably beyond most humans. Turandot’s character is perhaps uniquely static in opera, apart from Gianni Schicchi, of course, who does nothing but lie there to fulfil his role. Turandot, on the other hand, must have a powerful voice. There is that wonderful end of scene when she must stand out against an orchestra playing forte, a stage full of chorus in full voice, and the rest of the cast giving everything.  It is musical magic but does need a lot of wind. The role, however, does not allow much scope for acting or even action.

Calaf, on the other hand, can be mobile, especially in the first act. But, after sounding his gong at the end of the act, he spends most of his time pondering. And singing, of course, and that often has to be very powerful. The body does have its limits.

There are two lesser characters in Timur and Liu. Timur is old, lame and blind, so without Liu's help, he cannot credibly add movement. Liu has two very demanding sections and, it has to be said, has the opera’s best music. At other times, however, she is tied to Timur’s immobility.

Ping, Pang and Pong, the triple act of priests, sometimes threatening, sometimes comic, at root fed up with their lot, do offer a director an opportunity for action. This is often translated to dance, but the roles actually have some demanding singing, and finding a singer who can dance as well is hard – let alone three! This often leads directors to split the roles between different people – one who dances and one who sings for each role. For the audience, this creates spectacle but does nothing for the drama.

Add to this mix the Prince of Persia, whose only role in act one is to be beheaded, an emperor in failing health, and not in full voice, let alone full body, and then minor roles which hardly figure, and one concludes that finding action in Turandot is not easily solved.

The chorus, therefore, is the opera’s main stay in terms of action. But the chorus has to do quite a lot of singing at high volume. The solution for designers is often to tier the stage with the singers occupying the gallery, whilst the action takes place at ground level. Productions often resort to a fashion show, where poor oppressed Chinese peasants wear glittering colourful costumes. Not in Valencia…

So how about this production in the hands of Alex Ollé in Valencia? Galleries for the chorus were used. These consisted of Escher-like staircases that went up and down leading nowhere. The costumes were largely black (for peasants and guards) or white for dignitaries. The principles, Calaf, Timur and Liu wore tertiary neutrals.

The use of black and white was clearly indicative of a society where there was no political power for the masses, and no desire to accommodate them on behalf of the elite. This totalitarian society thus maintained itself by recruiting soldiers from the masses – (hence dressed in black) – who oppressed the masses from which they came on behalf of the white-clad elite.

There were no dancers until the temptresses for Calaf in act three, so Ping, Pang and Pong had to do their own vaudeville routines, which worked to an extent. The problem in this production with Ping, Pang and Pong was their roles. They simply did not know who they were. In act one they appear on the street as drunken louts who taunt Calaf about his obsession with Turandot. Their concern did not convince. They are revealed in act two as army officers who inexplicably had a day off when the Prince of Persia was being beheaded! They are disgruntled about the role they feel they have to play. It comes as no surprise. Then in act three they are dressed in white – presumably priests and therefore part of the elite – when trying to attempt to persuade Calaf not to go through with his plan. Doubling these roles with dancers adds confusion. To make their three appearances seem like different characters makes no sense whatsoever. Even the implied transition from street to elite did not communicate, as a result of the functional roles they have to play in the drama.

So what then were the pluses in this production? Above all, it was act three. The final scene of Turandot was not written by Puccini who had died with the completion of Liu’s suicide. Liu killed herself so as not to divulge Calaf’s name, and she killed herself out of love for him. This leads Turandot to a change of heart. If love can do that for Liu, maybe she should try it?

No, the final scene of Turandot is usually dramatically about as convincing as Ping, Pang and Pong’s characterization in this production. Apparently, this icy princess, who has killed every suitor that has approached her, suddenly has a change of heart. It’s about his convincing a sainthood to a nonbeliever.

Alex Ollé in this production saved his master stroke until the end and – after many years of seeing productions of the opera – this was dramatically convincing and wholly in character. Calaf and Turandot walk around the dead Liu whose body remains in full view, professing their selfish love for one another, which really is love for themselves and their own interests. But Turandot does not convince anyone. Surely, she is leading her suitor on.

In Alex Ollé’s version, Turandot retrieves Liu's knife and hides it in her sleeve. Then, as she admits that it was love that changed everything, she too commits suicide as the chorus repeats Calaf’s earlier “Vincero”, meaning that it is Turandot who won in the end, still her pure self in death. She has not compromised and it makes an utterly convincing finale.

Add to that Mark Elder’s insistence that “Nessun dorma” should finish dramatically in context and not with rousing major chord and applause for the tenor. So the evening was musically convincing as well.

So what had been up to that last act an average performance of the opera, beautifully sung and played, of course, not withstanding the poor characterization of some roles and an average staging, was elevated to magical status by making sense. Gregory Kunde, Ekatarina Senenchuk, and Carolina López Moreno as the principles was superb as well, but it is the ending that will endure.

When superlatives are not enough – Josep Vicent and Anna Federova with ADDA Simfónica in Rachmaninov and Mahler

 

Last night the 2025-2026 season of ADDA concerts was brought to close. On paper, for a seasoned concert goer, there was nothing particularly outstanding on the program. We were to hear Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody, and then the First Symphony of Mahler. In the end, the performances of both works approached perfection and originality. Despite the fact that both works were very familiar, the performances achieved memorable status, in the Rachmaninov because of the level of communication between the soloist and the orchestra, and then the Mahler because of the highly original approach to the work taken by Josep Vicent, conductor and artistic director of ADDA Simfónica.

Anna Federova was soloist in the Rachmaninov Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The ADDA audience had a preview of the music during the previous concert when Andrey Baronov played the Caprice number 24 as an encore. Rachmaninov’s variations on the same theme are an orchestral showpiece. There is rhythm and colour in every phrase, but despite all the massive contributions from the orchestra, the composer manages never to impinge on the soloist’s audibility. This is not surprising, since Sergei Rachmaninov was writing the piece to show off his own skills as a pianist, but the handling of the orchestra is also literally brilliant. Everything seems to shine, but the Rachmaninov bells are still in evidence.

The work contains the eighteenth variation, of course, which is become without doubt one of the most popular pieces in the repertoire. It is how it is hard not to sound clichéd in this music, but, as ever, the pace of the performance without pauses between the variations keep the work alive. Context is all – and breaking that context is a recipe for disaster. But ADDA Simfónica under Joseph Vicent brought the whole work to life, not just the famous bit! Anna Fedorova's playing was superb throughout, as would be expected from a soloist who has become so famous for her interpretation of Rachmaninov.

The eighteenth variation also provided the first encore. This was followed by a solo piece by Rachmaninoff, the Prelude Opus 32 number 12 I think. The music did not surprise because it is well known, but the musicianship of all concerned approached perfection.

And then to the second half featuring Mahler’s Symphony No1. I point out that this is the sixth time I have heard the work in concert performance in the last decade. I have probably heard it broadcast many times as well. It was, however, the first time that ADDA Simfónica have played it in a concert that I also attended. I was therefore prepared to renew an acquaintance with a work that I know well and that I first heard about sixty years ago in a recording by Bruno Walter.

Put simply, I have never heard Mahler’s First Symphony played like this. Josep Vicent’s take on the music – because it was surely a personal re-examination of the score that led to this performance – stressed the impressionistic nature of the first movement. The composer himself stated that it is supposed to be infused with nature. It is supposed to be evocative of sounds that one might hear on a country walk. Josep Vicent used rubato throughout the first movement, whenever it would make a point of stressing the detail of every sound combination that Mahler wrote. The off-stage trumpets of the start were miles distant, but the variable rhythm allowed the conductor to bring to the fore every detail of the score. Also clear was how easy is the transition in the slow movement from funeral march to Jewish klezmer. And again the use of tempo change stressed the contrast.

The result was just like hearing the music for the first time, so differently did the performance bring out the contrasts in this music. The approach was wholly original, ADDA Simfónica clearly enjoyed the challenge, it was a clear triumph for Josep Vicent and superlatives were not enough to describe the effect.