Tamara Stefanovich on impressive but strident sonata form, plus the best of February’s classical concerts
Tamara Stefanovich, Queen Elizabeth Hall ★★★☆☆
As musical marathons go, Tamara Stefanovich’s performance of 20 piano sonatas across three hour-long concerts might seem small beer. I’ve seen performances of 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in a single day, and all nine of his symphonies.
Nevertheless, as a feat of musical intelligence, artful planning and sheer stamina, this was quite something. The aim of Serbian-born, Berlin-domiciled Stefanovich was to dazzle us in the shortest space of time with the incredible variety of the piano sonata, from Bach and Scarlatti in the 18th century to Galina Ustvolskaya’s Sixth Sonata of 1986, mingled in surprising juxtapositions with astonishingly radical pieces by early-20th-century composers including Leo? Janá?ek, Feruccio Busoni, Charles Ives and those visionary Russians Alexander Scriabin and Nikolai Roslavets.
You’ll notice some sizeable omissions from that list of great piano sonata composers. One might mention a certain Ludwig van Beethoven, for instance, and a certain Joseph Haydn too. Presumably, Stefanovich would say they hardly need her help, but actually it would have been really interesting to hear one of Beethoven’s mould-breaking sonatas in this unusual company.
Still, what we did hear was remarkable for its expressive variety, made sharper by the fact that Stefanovich chose to play each sequence of six or seven sonatas straight through without a break. It’s become quite a fashion to “curate” unbroken sequences of pieces in this way, and as always it turned out to be a mixed blessing.
We had no time to digest one piece and prepare ourselves for the next – nor, one might add, did the pianist. That was a problem more than once, when Stefanovich threw herself from say the rococo sweetness of the 18th-century Catalan composer Antonio Soler into the mystically erotic ecstasies of Scriabin. The new piece took a while to come into focus.
Stefanovich is certainly a pianist of towering strength and passion, which was a boon in the huge rhetorical flourishes and sudden yawning silences of CPE Bach’s G minor sonata, and the swirling, yearning ecstasies of Scriabin’s Sonata No 9, and the even more turbid complexities of Roslavets’ Second Sonata. The guitar-like flourishes of the B minor sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, the Italian who became entranced by Spanish music, took on a proud grandeur, and at the other end of the scale the delicacy of Scarlatti’s G minor sonata was a delight.
However, it became clear that Stefanovich would make a delicate sound only when a piece unmistakeably demanded it, by being overtly delicate in itself. Without that obvious prompt, her tone tended towards an unvarying heaviness and hardness.
That was a problem in the second concert, which had three modernist sonatas from the 1920s. On one level, it was impressive. The dissonant chords in Bartók’s sonata were immense, the two fugues in Hindemith seemed carved from stone. But soon I longed for some light and shade.
It was in those pieces where light and shade seemed beside the point and only the expression of titanic force was required that Stefanovich really shone. The final piece, the Sonata No 6 by the austere Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya, involved literal forearm smashes to the keyboard, and fingerless gloves to make the pianist seemed deliberately awkward. Hardly the kind of music to inspire a standing ovation, you might think, but Stefanovich’s performance managed it. IH
Nonclassical, Barbican, London EC2 ★★★★☆
Despite its name, Nonclassical has become an indispensable part of the classical music scene. Since it was founded in 2004 by Gabriel Prokofiev – grandson of the composer – it’s provided a platform for young composers outside the classical mainstream by promoting concerts in unconventional spaces such as disused factories and clubs.
This Barbican date marked Nonclassical’s debut in a mainstream venue, and Prokofiev really seized the moment, presenting a lavish programme of no fewer than 14 new or recent pieces by composers with origins as varied as Morocco, Nigeria, China and the US. Some were purely electronic, some mingled electronics and conventional instruments. What they all had in common was a “spirit of place”, evoked often in the most literal way through recordings of the sounds made in a particular place.
Among them was Christian Onyeji’s Ufie, Igbo Dance, in which the sounds of the Main Market of Ogbete in his native Nigeria formed a backing to his delightfully joyous dancing piano music. Alongside the gently pastoral piano piece D’un Jardin Clair by the tragically short-lived composer Lili Boulanger, we heard the sounds of the garden where she strolled more than a century ago. Both were played with ravishing subtlety of touch by Rebecca Omordia.
This intimate, homely feel would come as a surprise to anyone who associates electronic music with the chilly beeps and hums of science-fiction soundtracks. As this concert showed, much electronic music these days is less concerned with Utopian futures and more focused on the sounds of landscapes, or birdsong, or humdrum things like street chatter.
That being the case, shiny new digital technology was less favoured here, and obsolete gear was much in evidence. Kate Carr’s recordings of the deep vibrations emanating from the area around the Bricklayer’s Arms in Bermondsey was garlanded with noises from numerous small toys, bits of wire-wool and scrunchy paper bags.
The Chinese-born, London-based “conceptual artist” Li Yilei accompanied their pre-made electronic piece Boundary Conditions with live performance on the Theremin, an instrument invented in 1919 that is played by waving one’s hands in the magnetic field around the instrument. Their sinuous, mysteriously ritualised hand-flutterings were certainly eye-catching, though for my taste the piece was too self-absorbed in its own sound-world of long-drawn-out drones and pulses.
That piece aside, everything was delightful and affecting in its own way, though the opener, A Return to Spatial Features performed by the four members of Langham Research Centre, stood aside from the overall atmosphere of evocative “spirit of place”. The images of 1970s brutalist architecture and the clangorous, beautiful modulated sound of the piano took us back to a more bracing time when the future seemed something one could believe in. For a moment, I felt quite nostalgic. IH
Watch this concert until Feb 22 at 7.30pm at barbican.org.uk
Budapest Festival Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, London ★★★★★
Who was Igor Stravinsky? Was there an essential core behind the constant parade of different styles: the Russian primitivist, the up-to-the-minute Parisian sophisticate, the jazzer, the sober back-to-Bach classicist? Or was there nothing behind the mask?
The two all-Stravinsky concerts from the Budapest Festival Orchestra were bound to raise that question. They didn’t display every mask: there was no sign of the post-1950s ultra-modernist Stravinsky, more’s the pity. But still, the contrasts on display were so startling it was hard to believe the music came from the same person. In the orchestra’s thrilling second concert there was the heartless wit of the Concerto in D for strings, followed by the even more brilliant and brittle Capriccio for piano and orchestra, inspired (according to the interesting programme note) by what Stravinsky described as “The Beau Brummels” of music, Mendelssohn and Weber. Finally came a piece that wears no clothes at all apart from the odd bear-skin; Stravinsky’s evocation of ancient Russian ritual, the Rite of Spring.
Clothed or not, the kinship between the pieces was immediately evident, thanks to the supremely sharp energised performances. That stubborn “wrong” bass note at the beginning of the Concerto in D, which doesn’t agree with the harmony above and so gives a huge dissonant ‘kick’ to the music, found an echo an hour later in the Ritual of the Rival Tribes in the Rite of Spring, where a similarly “wrong” bass note grinds against the savage fanfares above. The orchestra’s founder and conductor Iván Fischer understands so well that Stravinsky’s mind moved even faster than his rhythms, which is what makes the music so exciting. But it also means the brilliance can flash by without registering so Fischer took time to let certain things really tell. The parody of a graceful dance in the first movement of the Concerto in D often seems merely brittle, but Fischer slowed it right down so the curtseys and bows became huge and surreal.
In the Capriccio he was joined by the young Georgian pianist Nicolas Namoradze, who showed just as keen an understanding of Stravinsky’s blend of wit, balletic grace and stifled expressivity. He made the ball-room roulades and scales and odd little mechanical basses soft and tender rather than brittle, while Fischer urged the solo string quartet and plangent cor anglais to seize the odd moments of lyrical warmth.
Then came the Rite of Spring, where any suggestion of lyrical warmth might seem beside the point – but Fischer encouraged us to hear it in the Mystic Circles of the Young Girls. And where savage clarity was required, he and the orchestra provided it. The clash of two rhythms in the Ritual of the Rival Tribes has never seemed so brutal.
Finally after the cheers and the standing ovation came the masterstroke of the encore. The players put down their instruments, rose to their feet and sang Stravinsky’s modest little Ave Maria. Pagan savagery was stilled, and an unsuspected tenderness towards the Mother of God shone through. Yes, there was a real person behind those masks, and a heart too. IH
Academy of Ancient Music, West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge ★★★☆☆
The Academy of Ancient Music, the Cambridge-based ensemble formed to play music of the 18th century and earlier on the right instruments and (more importantly) in the right style, is itself part of musical history; it was founded back in 1973 by the great performer-scholar Christopher Hogwood and now seems almost as venerable as the music it plays.
But the ensemble still has a spring in its step, as was proved by Wednesday night’s concert, devised and directed by the group’s current musical director Laurence Cummings. He had the ingenious idea of tracing the European travels of Nicholas Lanier, the gifted English composer and art-buyer for Charles I, and using these as the thread to hang a sequence of enticing instrumental and vocal pieces showing the interactions between the English and Italian styles.
I say “interaction” but really the traffic was all one way. In Laniers’s youth, in the early 17th century, English music was a backward thing, still wearing the sober mien of Renaissance music. Gentlemen played and listened to the grave and dignified viol, and scorned the vulgar violin. Well-born ladies and gentlemen sat round tables to sing beautifully turned madrigals, or sang sweetly melancholy or cheerful lute songs. We heard one of those right at the beginning: John Dowland’s “Come Again” sung and played in three different ways by the assembled singers and players, a nice touch that reminded us how flexible music-making was in those days.
It was lovely, but decorous. Then we were plunged into the desperate sorrow of the abandoned nymph Arianna, as expressed in the new, impassioned Italian style of Monteverdi’s Ariadne’s Complaint (but not over-impassioned; unlike some big-name singers who perform this piece, the soprano Anna Dennis knows the virtue of holding something back). Thereafter, the concert traced an intricate route back and forth between the grave antique English style and the turbulent Italian “modern” one.
Nicholas Lanier was a key figure in the “modernisation” of English music, and we heard several pieces of his, including a setting of the Priestess Hero’s lament that her lover Leander has drowned, which showed that he’d learned the lessons of the new Italian style well. But not all the music in this very rich programme of 16 pieces by 12 different composers could be neatly disposed on an English/reactionary, Italian/modern axis. Two viol pieces for solo viola da gamba (a sort of antique cello) by Captain Tobias Hume came across as eccentrically individual, in the wonderfully characterised performances by Reiko Ichese. Orlando di Lasso’s French song “One day I saw a Fuller” (Un jour vis un foulon) was old-fashioned in its saucy simplicity.
Interestingly, three pieces were by women, and one of these, composed by Giulia Caccini, was a setting of yet another lament by an abandoned woman that beat even Monteverdi in its agonised, eroticised dissonance. In the beautifully shaped, plangent performance by bass Thomas Walker, accompanied by a rich ensemble of lutes, strings harp and keyboard, it seemed the most modern piece of the evening. IH
OAE/Manacorda, Royal Festival Hall ★★★☆☆
When a neglected piece by a great and loveable composer is revived, it’s hard to listen in a state of distanced objectivity. You want the experience to be a revelation, and the piece to be great, and you eagerly seize on any gleams of inspiration in the music to prove the case.
That was my experience at Tuesday night’s concert from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The composer was Schumann, and the piece was his Violin Concerto, composed in 1853. The piece had an unfortunate history. It was suppressed by the dedicatee (who thought it wasn’t up to scratch), disappeared from view for almost a century in the Prussian State Library, and was premiered only in 1937. Since then it’s been revived every few years, but has never really caught on.
Tuesday’s performance from the wonderful German violinist Isabelle Faust showed why. The piece exuded that special Schumann sweetness, but in a pallid way, like a faded photograph of a beautiful scene. The grand opening seemed oddly proportioned, the orchestration was thin – Schumann seemed to forget about the woodwinds for pages at a stretch – and the violin part was difficult in a way that seemed awkward rather than heroic.
So it was bound to be an uphill struggle for Faust and the orchestra, but their approach didn’t always help. Both the violinist and conductor Antonello Manacorda seemed super-aware of the piece’s weaknesses and compensated for them with a nervous, edge-of-the-seat intensity. Frankly, it would have been better if they’d just relaxed and allowed the piece’s easy-going, slightly rambling charm to unfold naturally. Instead of making the detached notes in the slow movement so precise and dry, Faust could have caressed them, and could have garlanded the descending phrases with a few gracefully pathetic “sighs”. As it was, the performance felt strenuously well-meaning rather than winning.
Strenuousness was actually a key-note of the evening, thanks to the lean, ascetic figure of Manacorda on the podium. He’s one of those Italian musicians who’s become entranced by German music and culture (he lives and works in Berlin), and he seemed determined to turn everything onto an object lesson in German Romantic transcendentalism. The opening piece, Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, had no hint of the Scottish outdoors. The opening crept into existence in an unusually slow tempo, and thereafter the piece felt haunted and mysterious, as if we were in the Scotland of the romantic imagination rather than a place of wind and salt-spray.
The final performance, of Schumann’s Second Symphony, had the same quality of strangeness added to beauty which the great essayist Walter Pater said was the essence of Romanticism. Here, that emphasis felt exactly right as the piece itself is so ambiguous, with melancholy alongside elfin mystery, and grand fanfares emerging through mist like huge spectres. The dusky-bright shades of the orchestra’s “period” instruments certainly played its part in revealing all this, but it was Manacorda’s subtle shaping hand and the wonderful playing that really told. IH
This concert was filmed by the OAE and will be available to rent at oae.co.uk in the near future
Theatre of Voices, Kings Place ★★★★☆
The human voice is truly a miraculous thing. It’s an assemblage of vibrating chords and tongue and lips which allows us to speak. It’s the primordial musical instrument, the only one we all possess. And it’s also an amazingly flexible noise-maker, which can imitate the sound of a drum or a bird-cry or wind through the trees.
Saturday night’s concert from the Theatre of Voices, a Danish vocal quartet led by English baritone Paul Hillier, made full use of all those attributes. It was part of the year-long Voices Unwrapped series at Kings Place in London, which offers a bird’s-eye view of the extraordinary range of the world’s vocal music. The Theatre of Voices inhabits a small, little-known corner of this vast world that used to go by the name of “extended vocal techniques”, and the music has a special power to stimulate the imagination. It’s hard not to picture a scene when you hear a singer’s voice transform from pure note to watery sound.
So, this group has an apt name, and it performs with spell-binding virtuosity. In Song by the Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, I had to marvel at the way the vocalists soared and swooped and then hit a complex chord out of the blue with complete accuracy. It seemed as miraculous as a homing pigeon’s arrival, and almost made up for the facile quality of the music, which led by all-too-predictable degrees from vocal sounds to John Dowland’s famous song Flow My Tears. Just to add insult to injury, the composer transmogrified this quintessentially melancholy song into something happy by transforming its minor harmonies to major.
Fortunately, the other two pieces offered something more substantial. David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion was a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the little girl who freezes to death in the street while the good citizens of the town enjoy a jolly New Year’s Eve. The actual telling was done in an urgently anxious undertone, the four voices shadowing each other at different speeds, each singer marking out their circling melody with strokes on bells or drum. In between came more overtly lyrical commentaries, like the arias in a Bach Passion. It created a moving sense of fatalism tinged with pity, as if to say: this has happened a million times before, and will happen a million times again.
The final piece shifted our focus from the sufferings of one small girl to the vast aeons of geological time, where human feelings count for nothing. And yet in its vast impassive grandeur, John Luther Adams’s A Brief Descent into Deep Time (here receiving its world premiere) did develop a power to move.
Over the music’s 20-minute span, the four singers sang the names of rocks of different ages, beginning with the youngest, a stripling of only 250 million years, uttered at a piercing altitude by soprano Else Torp. She and the other singers traced a complex, spiralling descent down to the depths, against the backdrop of a simpler descent in organ and percussion, to mirror the increase of the rocks’ age to the two billion year-old Vishnu schist. It was simple but never simplistic, and performed with consummate artistry. IH
This concert will be broadcast at a later date on BBC Radio 3
BBC SO/Bychkov: Pictures at an Exhibition, Barbican ★★★★☆
The BBC’s year-long centenary celebrations have a musical focus this weekend, with concerts from all the BBC Orchestras and Chorus, and the Ulster Orchestra. The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s contribution, conducted by its long-time collaborator Semyon Bychkov was cannily programmed, with Mussorgsky’s evergreen Pictures at an Exhibition preceded by a little-known piano concerto from the very young Richard Strauss. And to remind us of its role as a patron of contemporary music, the orchestra launched the evening with the UK premiere of Mari by the American composer Bryce Dessner.
Dessner is better known as a founder-member of the American pop band The National, which might lead you to expect something populist. And it’s true Dessner’s piece has the imprint of American minimalism, that world-beating style almost every budding composer wants to embrace. The winning formula is a piece which starts with glowing sounds like a new dawn, develops a ticking, pulsating energy out of John Adams or Michael Torke, and builds to a massive affirmative ending – with maybe a touch of paradisal innocence, as a nod to environmental concerns.
There were moments when it seemed Mari might be pressed from the same mould, but to his great credit Dessner refused to follow the usual triumphal trajectory. The piece was certainly inspired by nature, specifically the long walks Dessner took during lockdown around his home in the Pyrenees. But what we hear in Dessner’s piece is a particular vision of nature, soaked through and through with the distant horn calls of Mahler and the bucolic tunefulness of Dvo?ák. The opening minute even had a blatant quotation from Dvo?ák’s New World Symphony.
Thereafter the piece constantly undercut our expectations. A busy rhythmic pattern in the percussion would be set up, only to peter out as the musical focus shifted elsewhere. At one point an anxious and turbid passage in the lower strings was contradicted by two wildly bucolic violins above, as if a hoedown had sprung to life in the depths of a forest. And just occasionally the many-layered intricacy would be cut short by a single luminous harp-and-bell chord, like those moments in Mahler symphonies when a window seems to open onto another world. The danger with such frequent changes of direction is they create a sense of indecisiveness – a danger that Dessner’s piece didn’t always avoid, engrossing and beautiful though it often was.
Then came Strauss’s early piano concerto Burleske, a piece which formally was every bit as peculiar as Dessner’s – but, unlike Dessner, Strauss could cover the dubious joins with delicious late-romantic puff-pastry. There were two cadenzas (i.e. show-off moments for the pianist without the orchestra), both equally pointless, and the piece seemed to end at least three times. But one couldn’t mind, as the mock-romantic heroics were so beautifully played the BBC SO under Bychkov, and soloist Kirill Gerstein despatched the virtuoso leaps and glittery passagework with such light-fingered aplomb.
Finally came Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in the familiar orchestration by Ravel, which is so brilliantly done the piece can easily end up sounding like a slick orchestral showpiece. It never did here, because Bychkov’s broad pacing and attention to detail made it seem grand and noble rather than brilliant. The concert proved once again that with his intense, energised presence on the platform this orchestra always sounds special. IH
Listen to this concert for 30 days via BBC Sounds
Then & Now, London Sinfonietta, Purcell Room ★★★☆☆
Not so long ago, contemporary classical music was an otherworldly thing, a play of pure sounds disposed in fascinating abstract patterns. The world of politics and burning social issues barely left a trace on it.
How different things are now. A new generation of composers is turning its back on abstraction and embracing socio-political issues with a vengeance, and two of them were showcased at Sunday night’s concert by the UK’s best-known contemporary music group the London Sinfonietta.
They were beneficiaries of the Sinfonietta’s Writing the Future scheme, which offers mentoring from seasoned professionals to young composers as they create a new piece. The two brand-new works, each about 30 minutes long, promised an “immersive” experience in which live music from a handful of performers on the Purcell Room stage would be augmented by electronic sounds, video images and theatrical presentation.
The first of them, Luke Lewis’s The Echoes Return Slow, was an evocation of the hard lives of Welsh miners and their wives in the period just after the Second World War. The piece’s basic raw material was black-and-white photography and film from the period, showing rows of terraced houses and pitheads shrouded in coal smoke, blackened miners at work, and wives endlessly washing shirts by hand. Over the speakers, we heard interviews with miners, conducted by the famous folk-song collector Alan Lomax, interwoven with later reminiscences of miners’ wives.
As for the music, it consisted of a skein of melodic lines for a few wind instruments, strings and piano, often mournful, sometimes skittishly cheerful. In his pre-concert chat, the composer told us these mimicked the rhythms and cadence of the spoken voices, but I had to take that on trust as the connection was hard to hear. Without that, the music seemed a mere backdrop, which proved quite touching – especially at the end where the instruments supplied harmonies to the recording of a miner singing – but ultimately frustrating. One wanted the music to step centre-stage and take possession of the work, but it seemed content to be the humble handmaiden of the images.
In Alicia Jane Turner’s Tell Me When You Get Home, the music was not just centre-stage but in-your-face. The theme here was the threat of violence that surrounds women all the time, expressed through the travails of an imaginary young woman, played with blazing intensity by Ella Taylor. As they paced around the darkened stage in between the players, they rehearsed the precautions the young woman must always take (“avoid dimly places… carry a small noise-maker”), while fending off leering and threatening comments from men.
Eventually she is raped, and her distress rises to a desperate climax as it seems for a moment that she might be burned alive as well. Then, after a moment of silence and inky blackness, Taylor has to switch from victim to the figure of the avenging witch, who is more than a match for patriarchal violence.
Turner’s style began here with late-Romantic moonlit menace not far from early Schoenberg, but soon became frenzied and expressionist, a transition expressed with blood-curdling intensity by the players under conductor Sian Edwards. Their music may not have been the most original, but it left us in no doubt about the urgency and importance of its theme. IH
Pavel Kolesnikov, Wigmore Hall ★★★★☆
So often, young virtuoso pianists have an incredible technique but, in terms of ideas and personality, seem a blank canvas. You wait, hoping the passing of time will make them interesting.
With the young Russian-born Pavel Kolesnikov, one never had to wait. From the moment he won the Honens Competition in Canada almost 10 years, ago he seemed a true original, even though this quality doesn’t always make for easy listening. His recording of Chopin’s Mazurkas at first seemed merely odd, and it took perseverance to understand the poetic intent behind the rhythmic distortions.
There were similarly challenging moments at his recital on Thursday night at the Wigmore Hall, not least at the very beginning. Kolesnikov glided on to the platform in a loose white shirt and jacket, looking around half his 32 years, raised one finger to his lips – which made us all freeze in our seats – and then recited the first few sentences of Marcel Proust’s great novel à la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), so quietly you could barely hear him. He then sat down and plunged straight into Schubert’s late Fantasy Sonata.
This was the opening gambit in his programme inspired by the 100th anniversary of Proust’s death. Most musical tributes to Proust dwell on the central musical mystery of his huge novel: who is the mysterious imaginary composer Vinteuil? Might it have been Gabriel Fauré, or the young Venezuelan-born Reynaldo Hahn, who became Proust’s lover?
Kolesnikov’s tribute to Proust was much more imaginative and interesting. He understands that what really interested Proust about music was the way it can act like a mysterious scent that catches us unawares on a balmy summer evening, stimulating memories from long ago. It has a magic power to bend time, or even make it vanish.
In this recital, Kolesnikov strove to recreate that sense, weaving together numerous musical scents and feelings without pause. Some of them came from Proust’s own time. We heard movements from Hahn’s wonderful series of short character pieces The Distracted Nightingale (another Proust reference, possibly? At one point, Proust describes the mysterious Vinteuil sonata as sounding “like a bird abandoned by its mate”). Later came one of Hahn’s deliciously nostalgic waltzes, laid side-by-side with Schubert’s tiny, waltz-like Atzenbrugger Tanz. Both were wrapped by Kolesnikov in subtle half-shades, so one hardly knew which was which. Gabriel Fauré’s disquieting Nocturne No 12 gave way seamlessly to the mysterious, grave Sarabande by the French Baroque composer Louis Couperin.
Not everything was shadowy; the fugue from César Franck’s Prélude, choral et fugue felt as if it was hewn out of granite. And not everything was successful. Kolesnikov was too keen to highlight the “timeless” quality in the first movement of Schubert’s Fantasy Sonata, so the music lost its natural, spacious swing and felt simply too long. But one could overlook the concert’s faults – and the annoying request to the audience to applaud only at certain moments – because it created a unique aesthetic experience. Not many artists can offer that. IH
Watch this concert for 30 days on the Wigmore Hall archive at wigmore-hall.org.uk
LPO/Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 ★★★★☆
One way for an orchestra to raise its profile – and boost the box office – is to appoint a star soloist as artist-in-residence. The LPO seems to have chosen well in the German virtuoso violinist Julia Fischer, if Wednesday night’s full and very warm audience in the Festival Hall is anything to go by. She feels like a reincarnation of one of those aristocratic violinists of the post-war period such as Arthur Grumiaux, with a sweetly lyrical tone and not a note out of place.
She was shown off to perfection in this concert, where she played two slender, elegant Mozart violin concertos between two mighty orchestral tone poems by Richard Strauss. Fischer was in a sense the mediating influence between the two, because there were times when she played Mozart as if it were Strauss.
That’s something close to a sin nowadays, as the period-performance movement has taught us that there ought to be a chasm between the two styles. Strauss needs a full-blooded expressivity and a sound that’s richly blended rather than crystal-clear (except when he’s pretending to be Mozart, which on this occasion he wasn’t). Mozart needs lightness, clarity, poise, and a minimum of that emotive wobble that goes by the name of vibrato.
That revolution in style, now at least 40 years old, seems to have passed Fischer by. She plays Mozart with a near-constant beguiling vibrato that gives a tensile strength to her sound, and a way of phrasing that is almost haughty in its perfection. Hearing her play the rising phrase at the opening of the slow movement of Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto in a single bow-stroke was mesmerising, in the same way watching a dancer execute a perfect pirouette en pointe. But impressive though Fischer’s performances were they seemed somehow over-spiced and intense for Mozart’s music, as if a delicate line drawing had been coloured in thick oranges and purples.
In Strauss’s tone poems, a rich palette would be entirely appropriate, but in fact these performances led by Danish conductor Thomas S?nderg?rd were notable for their delicacy. The dreamy episode in Don Juan when the roving seducer feels the pangs of real love was beautifully played, the strings forming the softest of cushions under Ian Hardwick’s tender oboe. S?nderg?rd made us feel the urgency of the hero’s amorous adventures, but also the utter contrast of those moments when the Don’s attention was seized and time for a moment seemed to stop. Sometimes, the performance seemed too refined for its own good; the big horn melody could have done with a more authentic Straussian swagger.
In the second of the tone poems, Death and Transfiguration, Strauss foreswears swagger and offers a riveting vision of a soul’s struggles with death, with a final vision of transcendence. S?nderg?rd controlled the narrative with an unerring hand, but it was the extraordinary sound of the orchestra, shining with an unearthly calm light, that made the performance truly memorable. IH