Month: July 2012

Fine touring youth orchestra from California victim of certain difficulties

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Ravel: La Valse
Copland: Clarinet Concerto
Billy the Kid Ballet Suite
Richard Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

California Youth Symphony conducted by Leo Eylar, with Jeffrey Liu (clarinet)

Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul

Wednesday, 4 July 2012

There were a number of unfortunate features to this concert: it was not well advertised, and I suspect that thus, the audience was mainly made up of members of the Cathedral congregation, and parents and supporters travelling with the orchestra.

Secondly, the leaflet about the Cathedral’s Winter Festival of Music gave the starting time as 7.30pm.  When I got there at 7.20pm the concert had already started; in fact the Ravel item had finished.  It began at 7pm.  Yet most of the audience was already in place, which confirmed to me that they were mainly people ‘in the know’.  The Cathedral was less than half-full.

Finally, there is the difficulty with the Cathedral’s acoustics (once described by a Wellington singer as ‘bathroom acoustics’!)   The sound was surprisingly good in softer passages, but once this large orchestra hit forte, let alone double-forte, the noise was almost deafening, with no definition of sound; the various parts of the orchestra could seldom be heard distinctly.

While a chamber orchestra, particularly if playing baroque music, can be heard tolerably well here, it is no place for a very large orchestra, especially if they have little time to adjust to the acoustic.

It was generous of the orchestra to donate proceeds of the concert to the Christchurch Earthquake Relief Fund; they know about earthquakes in California.  This was an orchestra of 111 players; surprisingly, over three-quarters of the members were of Chinese or Korean ethnicity.

Given the date, it was understandable that Copland featured twice on the programme.  The clarinet concerto is a very effective work, with many virtuoso passages for the soloist, who was an outstanding performer.  The reverberation was a bit of a problem in fast solo passages, but otherwise was not as much of a concern as had I expected.  The orchestra sounded very fine, and lush in places.  The piano is used quite extensively, and, as part of the orchestra, spoke clearly enough (which is not the case with solo piano in this building).

The music was jazzy in places; it was an absorbing and enjoyable work, given an accomplished performance, especially by the soloist.

The conductor spoke to the audience in the interval about Aaron Copland (1900-1990), but much of it was inaudible, except perhaps to the people in the front few rows.

The story of the Copland ballet follows the life of the infamous outlaw Billy the Kid. The suite takes music of the ballet.  It begins by depicting pioneers trekking westward. The action shifts to a small frontier town, where young Billy and his mother are present. Billy’s mother is killed by an outlaw; Billy kills the murderer, and goes on the run.

The scene then shifts to Billy living as an outlaw in the desert. He is captured (the gun battle is featured in the music by percussion effects) and taken to jail, but manages to escape after stealing a gun from the warden during a game of cards. Returning to his hideout, Billy thinks he is safe, but eventually he is caught and killed. The music ends with the opening prairie theme, with pioneers once again travelling west.

The playing was always exciting, especially that of the brass section, but they particularly were rather mangled by the acoustic, especially when joined by the percussion; the timpani reverberated on the floor and from the pillars to an excessive degree. The strings gave a marvellously smooth and projected timbre.

The Strauss work (one played far too frequently on RNZ Concert) acquired very little precision, and became a jumble – not the players’ fault.  Wind solos got lost.  Nevertheless, when one could hear them separately, all the sections played well.  As far as I could tell, they were accurate, and phrased well.

At times it became an endurance test in the loud passages.  The famous waltz fared better, being for strings alone, with a modicum only of brass and woodwind in places.  The violin solo for the concertmaster was very fine.  However, the final iteration of the waltz came over as far too loud.

As an encore, the orchestra let it rip with Sousa’s famous march Stars and Stripes for Ever.

This is a splendid orchestra, but it needs to be heard in the acoustics of a normal concert hall to be fully enjoyed.

(Details on Billy the Kid from Wikipedia).

 

 

Adventurous and rewarding recital by Richard Mapp and Donald Maurice

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Boris Pigovat: Prayer and Botticelli’s Magnificat (world premiere)
Georges Enescu: Sonata in the Romanian Folk Character (transcription by Donald Maurice)

Donald Maurice (viola) and Richard Mapp (piano)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 4 July, 12.15pm

Students at New Zealand schools of music, and those at the school in Wellington in particular are fortunate in working in an environment that both encourages original composition and its performance, and encourages the exploration of not so new music.

Obviously, that is not at the expense of furnishing students’ memories with the great music of the past, though many will have come from secondary schools where exposure to very much of the wealth of music of earlier times has been patchy.

Certain of the teachers at the school have developed a reputation for unearthing music of unfamiliar composers as well as unfamiliar music of quite famous composers.

Donald Maurice has been prominent among them. Apart from being a leading figure in the international viola scene – he inspired the hosting of the International Viola Congress in Wellington a decade or so ago, for example – he has done very significant work in promoting the work of certain composers.

He published his own completion of Bartók’s unfinished viola concerto. With his colleagues in the New Zealand String Quartet he has committed to CD all 17 of Alfred Hill’s string quartets. And a couple of years ago, Maurice conducted the Wellington Chamber Orchestra in a concert of music by Bartók, Gary Goldschneider (a Romanian-inspired piece), Alfred Hill (one of his symphonies), Enescu and Pigovat (In Arentinian Style).

Mapp’s career has followed a more traditional, pianist’s path in terms of repertoire, returning to New Zealand after a lengthy career around Europe; and now lending his talents generously to accompany a great variety of musicians, students as well as distinguished professionals, in wide-ranging repertory; his much praised CD of piano music by Granados also indicates an exploratory disposition.

So this was another case of discovery. Maurice made a mark in 2011 with his recording with the Vector Wellington Orchestra, under Marc Taddei, of The Holocaust Requiem by Boris Pigovat; that followed the orchestra’s concert in 2008, with the first performance of Requiem outside Europe, as well as Prayer (which was played at the present recital), a piece for viola and harp, and a string quartet.

The Requiem was performed again, in September 2011, by Kenneth Young conducting the New Zealand School of Music Orchestra with Maurice playing viola.

Clearly he is attracted to the Israeli composer whose Prayer and Botticelli’s Magnificat he played at this concert.

Prayer is a slow, elegiac piece written during the composition of the Requiem, and breathing the same air; it too seems perfectly conceived for the viola which took charge of the emotional flavour of the piece, even though the piano’s role, when I could turn my attention away from the beauty and intensity of Maurice’s playing, was an essential participant, and handled with the utmost sensitivity by Mapp. Inevitably, I suppose, I also detected the accents of Ernest Bloch, particularly in the piece’s later phases.

Botticelli’s Magnificat was almost the work of another composer entirely, inspired by the famous painting in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, placing the Medici family in a religious context. It is coloured in light tones, treating the two instruments in somewhat unusual ways, in which the piano is accorded greater prominence much of the time; it carried an open, clear melody while the viola played a sustained single note, a pedal, though in the treble register; however, the viola soon picked it up and elaborated it.

If our experience of Pigovat had been moulded so far by that Requiem and the Prayer, here was a more gracious, gregarious and peaceful fellow, though no less able to express emotion. It was a spirit that both players had no difficulty in communicating.

The sonata by Enescu was an even more interesting discovery (for me). An arrangement by Maurice of Enescu’s third violin sonata in A minor (Op 25), titled ‘dans le caractère populaire roumain’, as is the transcription. He has played it in the United States and Australia, as well as previously in New Zealand.

It struck me that one could approach it from one of two quite different standpoints: one, as a misalliance between generally lively folk music and its enforced conformity with formal classical composition styles; two, as offering a useful and imaginative model for the reassertion of the most common source of inspiration for serious composers over the centuries – popular music which is assimilated into interesting formal structures, as with the last movements of the third Razumovsky Quartet or Brahms’s Piano Quartet Op 25, or Smetana’s Ma Vlast.

I incline to the latter view, hearing it as arising from the same source as his two wonderful Romanian Rhapsodies, only here employing more refined resources. It starts with themes that are distinctly gypsyish in both instruments, with the piano often assuming a rather more important role to begin with, divertingly decorative against the viola which is confined for a while to sustained bowings that are in the nature of pedals.

The note about the second movement suggested a sinister mood, darkness, but I did not sense nocturnal terrors or the presence of anything supernatural, though the piano was given to darting about unpredictably. The third movement too was characterised in the notes in highly fanciful terms, and again my fears were not realised, but the character of the music and the highly accomplished playing convinced me that their pains with its performance had been justified and that more of Enescu’s music deserves a regular place in concert programmes.

Mostly musical anniversaries of 2012

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Earlier in the year we threatened to publish a list of significant musical anniversaries that deserved to be celebrated in 2012. It’s not too late.

This has obviously been a work in progress, constantly being added to, and it will never be exhaustive; we would welcome being told of omissions or corrections from others whose minds are bent in a similar way.

In addition to musical references are some to writers with (or without) musical connections.

1512

Supposed birth of Jacob Clemens non Papa, Flemish Renaissance polyphonist. Died c. 1555.

 

1562

John Bull and Jan Sweelinck were born this year.

Adriaan Willaert (Flemish composer) died in Venice in 1562, where Giovanni Gabrieli lived and died in the same year.

 

1612

Poet Richard Crashaw was born in 1612. He was one of the religious poets of the 17th century, so-called metaphysical poets.

 

1662

Francesco Cavalli (born 1602) was invited to Paris by Cardinal Mazarin where, in 1662, he produced Ercole amante at the Théâtre des Tuileries in Paris with Louis XIV taking part, dressed as the Sun King.  Cavalli’s opera career began in 1639, near the end of Monteverdi’s.

 

1712

John Stanley was born; a blind English organist and composer.

Corelli’s 12 concerti grossi were published in 1712

Handel’s first opera in London was Rinaldo in February 1711. In 1712 he composed Il pastor fido.

Alessandro Scarlatti’s Il Ciro was premiered in 1712.

Frederick the Great, the enlightened Prussian monarch, was born in 1712. He was both a brilliant leader, military strategist, arts and music lover. He was a flutist and employed Bach’s son Carl Philip Emmanuel who perhaps, in 1747, encouraged the king to invite his father to Potsdam. For father Bach it was an often discomfitting experience.

 

1762

Two Italian instrumental composers, Francesco Manfredini and Francesco Geminiani died.

André Chénier, the French poet, was born; though a supporter of the Revolution, he wound up on the wrong side of the leaders of The Terror and was guillotined just two days before the fall of Robespierre. Librettist, Luigi Illica, used the facts of Chénier’s life to write a libretto that inspired Umberto Giordano to write his best, or at least his most famous, opera, Andrea Chénier.

Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, premeired in 1762 One of the most important operas in the sense of changing the idea of what opera was.

And Thomas Arne’s best-known surviving opera, Artaxerxes was produced in 1762 at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. It used a Metastasio libretto which had been set by J C Bach the year before, for Turin.

1812

Friedrich von Flotow was born (Martha, of 1847, whose most famous aria is the lovely ‘Ach, so fromm’, better known in the Italian version, ‘M’appari’; it’s also famous for its version of ‘The last rose of summer’).

Pianist, Liszt’s rival, Thalberg born

And these died:

Franz Hoffmeister. Music publisher and prolific composer, contemporary of Mozart in Vienna (see Mozart’s Hoffmeister Quartet, K 499)

Jan Ladislav Dussek: Bohemian-born composer and pianist, peripatetic: Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, France, England.

The 1812 Overture was not, of course, written in 1812, but in 1880.

In 1812 Rossini’s career had just begun. His first opera was La cambuiale di matrimonio in 1810, not a success. But by 1812 he was turning 20 and getting into his stride; he premiered four operas in 1812:

L’inganno felcie, in January
Ciro in Babilonia in March
La scala di seta in April
La pietra del paragone on my birthday 26 September

First performance by Carl Czerny of Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto in Vienna

 

Literature in 1812:

Byron’s Childe Harold published in 1812

Russian novelist Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov was born in 1812. Famous mainly for Oblomov, whose chief character is a paragon of sloth.

Two of the greatest literary figures in 19th century Britain were born just 200 years ago: Charles Dickens and poet Robert Browning. I don’t know whether Dickens was particularly interested in music, but Browning was. A poem I came across at school has continued to fascinate me: A Toccata of Galuppi’s. in which Browning’s familiarity with music and its technical elements is clear.

Pertinent lines:

“Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I take your meaning, ‘tis with such a heavy mind!

“Here you come with your old music, and here’s all the good it brings.…

“…
While you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord?

“What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions – ‘must we die?’
Those commiserating sevenths – ‘Life might last! We can but try!’

“…
Hark, the dominant’s persistence till it must be answered to!

“So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
‘Brave Galuppi! That was music! good alike at grave and gay!
‘I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!’”
…

When I read it in the 1950s, the name Galuppi (1706 – 1785) meant nothing to me and 30 years later it still meant very little, till the arrival of the CD and the desire for new music that was, in general, not satisfied by most contemporary music, stimulated the exploration of early music, including a lot of Galuppi’s music – operas, concertos, chamber and organ music.

And now we find Galuppi, just one of a host of Italian composers who flourished through the 18th century, filling the previously empty years between the death of Vivaldi and the arrival of Rossini and Paganini who heralded a revival of Italian music. Some of the reappearing composers of the 18th century: Sammartini, Tartini, Locatelli, Geminiani, Salieri, Piccinni, Sacchini, Paisiello, Martini, Cimarosa, Jommelli, Traetta, Sarti…

1862

Delius and Debussy born

As well as: Edward German – composer of English operetta, Merrie England

Alphons Diepenbrock, one of the rare race of Dutch composers

Léon Boëllmann, organist and composer: his best known work is Suite Gothique.

Ludovic Halévy (La Juive) died in 1862.

Two major operas were premiered in 1862:

Béatrice et Bénédict (Berlioz) at Baden-Baden

La forza del destino (Verdi) at St Petersburg

 

Two German poets died in 1862:

Ludwig Uhland and Justinius Kerner

And Gerhart Hauptmann was born, a playwright, best known for Die Weber (The weavers). He was Silesian and his end was poignant and barbaric. He was among the millions of Germans forcibly expelled at the end of World War II from the countries of Eastern Europe and the former eastern provinces of the pre-war Germany, such as East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. The fact of being a great writer, a Nobel Prize winner (1912), now 84 years of age, made no difference to the orders of the Soviet colonel charged with the task of expelling all Germans from Hauptmann’s town. Faced with the finality of the order, Hauptmann fell ill and died and was buried, not according to his wishes, but on an island in the Soviet occupied zone of Germany, near Stralsund in the North Sea.

Maurice Maeterlinck, playwright, was born in 1862; in my childhood I remember being taken to a play called The Bluebird in the Opera House in Wellington. But he’s most famous for writing a play that inspired a composer born in the same year as he was – Debussy, who set Pelléas et Mélisande as an opera which led to considerable animosity between poet and composer.

 

1912

The following composers born :

Xavier Montsalvatge, many singers are attracted to his Cinco canciones negras

Carlos Guastavino, the fourth best-known Argentinian composer after Ginastera, Piazzolla and Golijov.

Jean Françaix 

José Moncayo –he wrote the exciting ‘Huapango’

Igor Markevitch – conductor/composer

Two radical American composers: John Cage and Conrad Nancarrow

Hugo Weisgall: Moravia-Jewish-born American composer, of mainly vocal music and opera.

Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Australian woman composer, much earlier than any comparable New Zealand woman composer.

Deaths:

Jules Massenet and

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Franz Schreker wrote Der ferner Klang in 1912, the best known of his operas, several of which have regained popularity recently.

Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé first performed by Ballet Russes at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris

Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire first performed, in Berlin

In Stuttgart, Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, initially just a 30minute opera, libretto by Hugo von Hofmansthal, was given as double bill with Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme: a thank-you to the great stage director Max Reinhardt who had directed Der Rosenkavalier. Hofmannsthal reworked the two elements, opera and play, into a new, integrated opera which Strauss set in 1916.

Mahler‘s Ninth Symphony was premiered in Vienna in June 1912, a year after his death.

Laurence Durrell was born in 1912: His Alexandria Quartet was a sensation when it appeared in the late 1950s, among students of literature anyway. (I re-read copies which are to be found both at home in Wellington and our beach bach). I wonder what its reputation is today.

 

1962

Britten’s War Requiem first performed at Coventry Cathedral

These composers died in 1962:

Fritz Kreisler – a number of works written ‘in the style of’, and initially published as by those mainly 18th century composers.

Jacques Ibert – his most popular pieces are Divertissement, based on his incidental music for the play Le chapeau de paille d’Italie, later a film by René Clair; and Escales (Ports of Call).

John Ireland, who, long after his death has been favourably re-assessed after decades of neglect.

Eugene Goosens. Best known as conductor but regarded himself more as a composer.

Hanns Eisler. He was a refugee from Nazi Germany to the United States, but after being accused of Communist connections by the McCarthy committee (look at Wikipedia: ‘Hollywood Blacklist’) returned to East Germany in 1948. Berlin’s principal music academy is named for him: Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler”

 

 

Triple the pleasure and more at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:

BEETHOVEN – Triple Concerto, for violin, ‘cello, piano and orchestra Op.56

KENNETH YOUNG – Douce Tristesse

HINDEMITH – Trauermusik for viola and string orchestra

BIZET – L’Arlesienne (Suite No.2)

with Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Andrew Joyce (‘cello), Diedre Irons (piano) and Julia Joyce (viola)

Wellington Chamber Orchestra (leader: Liz Pritchett)

Conducted by Peter van Drimmelen

St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday, 1st July, 2012

Some people know how to celebrate in style, and the Wellington Chamber Orchestra, by way of marking their fortieth year of giving concerts certainly popped a goodly number of musical champagne corks on this truly heartwarming occasion.

Even before conductor Peter van Drimmelen made his delightfully tangental entrance (from the side door of the church) to ascend the podium and begin the concert, there was a sense of something slightly “charged” hovering about the auditorium and amongst the audience – a buzz of excitement and expectation, undoubtedly in view of the programme and the starry line-up of musicians brought together to play some of it with the orchestra.

I was surprised at the number of concerts the conductor told us he had taken with the orchestra over the years, as it was the first occasion on which I had seen him conduct. He told us about his first concert with the orchestra, during which he played Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K.364, with his wife as the other soloist, and then, surprisingly, after a few other brief reminiscences announced his intention to make the present concert his final one with the ensemble.

So, for a couple of good reasons the concert was something of a milestone event – interestingly, though the programme proclaimed on the cover “WCO in 2012: celebrating 40 years”, nothing was made of this during the actual course of the afternoon. Perhaps the first and/or last concerts of such an anniversary year are the most appropriate occasions to mark such anniversaries, though reminders in between times (such as on the front of the programme) help keep up a sense of something special.

Thus it was that, in truly festive style, the concert began with a kind of birthday present for the orchestra, a work commissioned by Peter van Drimmelen from one of the country’s finest contemporary composers, Kenneth Young. Himself a fine conductor (occasionally of this orchestra, along with a number of others), Young has produced a number of brilliant and energetic orchestral works over the years. For this commission, however, he came up with a beautifully and lyrically-wrought piece, called Douce Tristesse (Sweet Sadness).

The composer’s brief note about his work suggested the piece was something of a valediction – his words “…..like looking at a familiar and fond vista for the last time….” reflected the music’s intense beauty and nostalgic longing, wrought by his adroit use of orchestral colour and texture. I would think that the players loved performing this work as it gave so many of them significant things to do, the wind players particularly in evidence throughout.

The whole orchestra responded to Peter van Drimmelen’s direction with, I thought, considerable sensitivity, the strings especially giving us some lovely soft playing in places. In fact the string-writing had a lovely “wind-blown” ambience during these moments, contrasting appropriately with more juicy lyrical moments such as their exchanges with the harp – the latter instrument was heard also in tandem with winds to beguiling effect.

I couldn’t see the player responsible for the firmly-toned horn solo (a forest of music-stands obscured a whole row of brass-playing faces!), but I could clearly appreciate the work of the orchestral leader, Liz Pritchett, with her solos, which incorporated a sweetly-floated harmonic at one stage of the piece, a lovely effect, as well as her delivering of the piece’s final few notes. At the music’s end, the composer was called to the front to acknowledge some well-earned applause for an attractive orchestral evocation.

The delicacy of Young’s sound-world was thrown into abrupt relief by the opening strains of Bizet’s second L’Arlesienne Suite, with its grandly processional-like opening, weighty and brassy, giving way to some wind interludes featuring the strains of a saxophone, to my delight. Later, the wind playing brought out all the folkish strains of the writing with great gusto.

Saxophone and clarinet gave the second movement an attractive rustic melancholy, while the flute-playing in the following Minuet, was outstanding, first in tandem with the harp and saxophone variously, and then in a beautiful concluding solo, which rightly earned the player the conductor’s and the audience’s special acknowledgement.

The concluding Farandole, taken at a terrific lick once the return of the opening march-tune had done its thing, brought out incredibly exciting playing, one of the players I spoke with afterwards confessing that the orchestra had never done it “that fast” in rehearsal!  There was great work from all concerned, with the percussion having a riotous time towards the end, and the counterpointed tunes roaring out uninhibitedly – I couldn’t help thinking that that devoted Francophile Sir Thomas Beecham would have heartily approved!

It was a concert of contrasts, with these heady festivities followed immediately afterwards by Paul Hindemith’s Trauermusic for solo viola and strings. There was actually a welcome luftpause after the Bizet while players not involved with the Hindemith got themselves off the stage, and a space for the viola soloist was configured. This was Julia Joyce, principal violist of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, a striking platform presence as well as a fine player, transfixing listeners’ ears with tones of intense focus and infinite nuance over the space of her first few notes, following a brief orchestra introduction.

Hindemith wrote the music while visiting London to play the British premiere of his Viola Concerto – after hearing of the death of King George V the composer produced within a day the Trauermusik, a piece for viola and string orchestra, and played this instead of his concerto at the concert. As well as quoting fragments of his own Mathis der Maler Symphony and the temporarily discarded concerto, Hindemith incorporated into the work the melody from a Bach chorale “Here I stand before Thy throne”, which was better-known in England as “The Old 100th”.

Julia Joyce took us unerringly into the work’s intensely lyrical sound-world (at the outset, to my ears not unlike that created by English composers – Tippett, for example, in places in his “Corelli” Fantasia”), moving from the first part’s sorrowing sounds into a brief folkish dance-like interlude, before plunging with the orchestra into another intense, more tightly-wrought, vigorous section, solo instrument and ensemble exchanging strongly-figured lines. These descended into silence, from which grew the chorale, Joyce’s heartfelt viola declamations speaking as an individual soul reaching out towards a kind of ambiently murmuring peace – well-controlled by all, and very moving.

So, onto the Beethoven Triple Concerto, with three more star soloists, two more section leaders (one actually the concertmaster) from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, plus one of New Zealand’s finest pianists. I had heard violinist Vesa Matti Leppänen and ‘cellist Andrew Joyce play together in a concerto during last year’s Brahms Festival, when they played the Double Concerto; and of course our third soloist Diedre Irons had, during the same concert series, given us the titanic B-flat Piano Concerto. With these full-scale, no-holds-barred traversals by the same musicians in mind, I was eagerly awaiting their combination in the Beethoven.

As was often the case in a classical concerto the orchestra set the scene, the playing here bright-toned, lively and spare, the light textures allowing some nice detailing  through, with noticeable ebb and flow, though the violins had an uncharacteristically scrappy moment just before the ‘cello’s first entry. What delight there was here in the discourse, firstly between the stringed instruments, and then including the piano, the orchestra all the while “playing to them” and stimulating even wider discoursings on the part of the three soloists.

From the very first ‘cello entry I loved the solo instruments’ different interactive voicings, with hardly a note, it seemed, taken for granted. Given the lead by the composer in most of the instrumental exchanges Andrew Joyce’s ‘cello set the tone, his eloquent phrasing by turns forthright and yielding, constantly “leading into” what his violinist colleague Vesa-Matti Leppänen was doing. In places the latter seemed like Horatio to the ‘cellist’s Hamlet, the violin-playing rather more upright and straightforward (a couple of awry end-of-phrase notes apart), and less inclined to expressive flights of fancy. But both players shared with pianist Diedre Irons a real sense of listening to what was going on both between them and with the orchestra. Diedre Irons’ piano-playing was a joy – bright-toned, and with plenty of tumbling warmth in her phrasing, bringing to the interactions that vital spark of energy which often sets performances alight. Thanks to these different expressions of give-and-take, the performance of the first movement sparkled with interest throughout, leading up to a coda that crackled with honest-to-goodness excitement.

Poetry and song filled the air with the slow movement’s performance – all three soloists responded to the orchestra’s rapt introduction with playing of great beauty – again, we experienced a sense of those musicians playing each others’ as well as their own music, in heart-warming accord.

The introduction to the finale felt like a gathering-up of tiny wisps of energy, each of the soloists adding his or her strand to the line, intensifying the mixture, and then spontaneously allowing the ‘cellist to impulsively take hold of the tendrils and swing into the open. At that point the performance became even more interesting, because the soloists and conductor seemed not to quite agree on a common pulse for the music. We heard the rhythmic strut of the polonaise-like gait richly pointed by the three soloists, but things were then moved along more resolutely, a shade impatiently, I thought in places, by conductor and orchestra.

Consequently, the ensemble had its not-quite-together moments, such as the strings accompanying of the ‘cello’s opening phrases – their droll chuggings were pushed along not quite in accordance with what Andrew Joyce was playing. As well, Peter van Drimmelen seemed not to want to give the loud orchestral chord that capped off a rush of concerted soloistic triplets any rhetorical space, but instead have it played “in tempo”, so that it too in the overall context had a sense of slightly undue haste. Of course, more sensation-mongering commentators would be glorying in the “creative tensions” that these discrepancies set up – but for me the orchestral tuttis didn’t quite have the sense of rhythmic enjoyment that the soloists had very obviously engendered. It was also (and more prosaically) true that any variations of pulse which either stretched out or squeezed the bar-or phrase-spaces were easily dealt with by the musicians.

An interesting hiatus occurred mid-movement when, after the three soloists had been musing on an amalgam of two-note phrases, tossing them back and forward with what seemed like great relish, and relaxing the pulse in doing so, the conductor, waiting to bring the orchestra in, actually turned around on the podium to look at them as if to say, “Well, have you three quite finished? – and can we get on, now?” All very professionally done, of course; and the music continued unabated.

Of course there was no great battle of wills, here, but it did seem that certain musical ideas weren’t quite in accord between those performing this work. I thought the big, A-minor “Polacca” episode didn’t “gell” sufficiently for those rhythms to have the proper “schwung”  Still, Beethoven survived! – and there were things which gave great delight, such as Diedre Irons’ sudden pianistic plunge into the vortex of C Minor, everything black-browed and threatening for a few moments before a reprise of the opening brought things back on an even keel.

Interestingly enough, after giving almost all the important leads to the ‘cello throughout the work, Beethoven used the violin to introduce the finale’s coda (well, perhaps “Stage One” of the coda! – as things go back to “Tempo 1” right at the end!). Here, Vesa-Matti Leppänen threw caution to the proverbial winds and his violin skipped away, leaving the orchestral strings trailing (fortunately, Andrew Joyce allowed them to catch up!) . What a wonderfully “busy” and mischievously garrulous Allegro the three soloists made of it, Diedre Irons keeping an eagle eye on the conductor and orchestra to keep things rhythmically ship-shape at the return of the polonaise-rhythm, and Peter van Drimmelen getting a splendidly buoyant orchestral response right at the end. Those final ascending figurations and pay-off chords were despatched with real élan from all concerned.

Sheer delight at the end, and plaudits for all – in sum, a wonderful concert.