CONCERTS

Peter Quantrill watches some fine performances from the Ryedale Festival, held in the Yorkshire Dales from 19 to 26 July

Even minus the high-summer audiences who usually pack out churches and chapels dotted across the Yorkshire Dales, the personality and atmosphere of the Ryedale Festival came over with surprisingly unmediated force on its online platform, ‘RyeStream’. Relief and release from the confines of quarantine infused all the performances: introducing a Baroque solo recital (20 July), Rachel Podger remarked: ‘It’s like a dream to be playing here,’ in the Arts and Crafts Chapel of Castle Howard, ‘and not in my living room.’

Podger’s performance of an A major Partita by a Salzburg student of Biber, Johann Joseph Vilsmayr, was accordingly liberated from the bar-line, beautifully sprung even in the most reflective of the four aria movements, and endowed with rustic delight in the concluding ground-bass Aria variata, leading naturally into the more familiar and ascetic countenance of the ‘Guardian Angel’ passacaglia from Biber’s cycle of Mystery Sonatas. Her up-the-octave version of Bach’s Sixth Cello Suite felt rougher and more songful than her commercial recording.

Abel Selaocoe’s more Romantic take on the Third Suite’s Sarabande punctuated a programme of songs from his native South Africa at All Saints Church in Helmsley (23 July). Some multichannel trickery was involved, with Selaocoe tapping a box of tricks at his feet while bowing, plucking and singing, but the most impressive aspect of the recital was the cellist’s command of a remote audience, in both his softly spoken introductions and his extrovert playing.

All Saints was also the venue for Tamsin Waley- Cohen’s Elgar programme (25 July). The salon accompaniment to the Chanson de matin was discreetly performed by Ryedale’s director Christopher Glynn, leaving the violinist free to find a more fragile and impassioned vein of expression in the solo part. Bringing a fiercely dramatic profile to the E minor Sonata, Waley-Cohen and Glynn came together as equals, with the violinist gracefully ceding to the piano at Brahmsian points of reflection and eruption.

Taking place in the library of Castle Howard, the Carducci Quartet’s account of the ‘Mishima’ Third Quartet by Philip Glass (26 July) was really captivating. Patrick Allen’s musical filming sensitively pulled the focus across and then into the overlapping textures so that every slight rhythmic remove and harmonic dislocation registered as another angle on a revolving but impassive object. Surely the audiences will return in 2021 but I hope the cameras come back too.

Theodor Sink plays to a live and present audience in Pärnu

KAUPO KIKKAS

Pärnu

TRIIN RUUBEL (VIOLIN) THEODOR SINK (CELLO) ESTONIAN FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA/PAAVO JÄRVI 17 AND 19 JULY 2020

The tenth annual Pärnu Music Festival didn’t happen quite as planned but organisers still managed to schedule six orchestral concerts (with four different orchestras) as well as numerous chamber music performances, masterclasses and workshops. Against all the odds, Paavo Järvi managed to assemble his Estonian Festival Orchestra, which unites players from around the world with talented locals. At its first rehearsal the ensemble sounded like a liberated racehorse. ‘There are some quiet passages in this symphony,’ Järvi said with a smile after the playthrough of Mendelssohn’s Symphony no.1, ‘but don’t worry; we will find them later.’

It was always the EFO’s long-term goal to bring local musicians up to a higher level. The biggest silver lining of the pandemic was that it allowed the orchestra to include more locals than ever - and prove that they (and it) have come of age. Repertoire, too, had a more local flavour than normal. Cellist Theodor Sink was the fine exponent of Lepo Sumera’s invigorating Cello Concerto from 1999 and EFO concertmaster Triin Ruubel was the radiant soloist in Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Violin Concerto no.2. Players looking for fresh but rigorous repertoire should seek both out.

BOOKS

Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto Tina K. Ramnarine

176PP ISBN 9780190611545 OUP £10.99 (P/B), £47.99 (H/B)

Sibelius’s Violin Concerto underwent its birth pangs in public. Its original version (1903-4) divided audience opinion but suffered the carping of critics such as Karl Flodin, and was extensively revised. Contrary to the probable expectations of her targeted readership of performers, curious listeners and advanced undergraduates, Tina Ramnarine eschews microscopic analytical examination of the work’s two versions in favour of a more telescopic appraisal of their genesis, consistently focusing on key contributors to its creation, crossgenre practices that influenced Sibelius’s creative thinking and the importance of nature in his aesthetics and musical ideals.

Eero Järnefelt’s 1892 portrait of Jean Sibelius

Having discussed Sibelius’s early training and musical life in late 19th-century Helsinki, Ramnarine charts the concerto’s historical background, taking into consideration the influence of Leopold Auer and the Russian violin ‘school’, the heightened Finnish nationalism of the period and its opposition to Russian imperial policies. She raises the notion of Sibelius, and more generally the virtuoso, as a political figure and demonstrates how the political minefield enveloping Sibelius worsened in Germany following his uneasy relationship with the Third Reich and Theodor Adorno’s post-war denunciation of his music. Her examination of recordings since Jascha Heifetz’s seminal 1935 account is necessarily selective but aptly transnational and she incorporates illuminating feedback from the composer regarding some interpretations.

Ramnarine also considers the pioneering efforts of, for example, Maud Powell, Ginette Neveu and Ida Haendel in creating a career path for female soloists; but she surprisingly makes light of BIS’s success in persuading Sibelius’s family to lift its embargo on the concerto’s original score and allow the recording of both versions, eventually by Leonidas Kavakos. Her final chapter discusses Sibelius’s legacy as a creative catalyst in Finland and abroad, and the importance of the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in the concerto’s global transmission.

Many readers may sense a lacuna in this book’s content, given that it includes no substantial analytical description of the concerto and its musical evolution. A more in-depth examination of the rhapsodic original version would have given more weight to Ramnarine’s view of the work as a ‘labor [sic] of virtuosity’, as most of Sibelius’s amendments were geared towards simplifying its technical demands and achieving greater structural cohesion. Her short handbook is well presented, includes a handful of pertinent images and music examples, and draws on a wide range of archival and other sources, many reflecting her own social science interests. It serves as an accessible guide to a greater understanding of the work and the various social, political, cultural and other aspects surrounding its creation and reception.

ROBIN STOWELL

Scale Up! A new scales method for viola Roger Benedict

84PP ISMN 9790700282554 PARTITURA €39

In his introduction Roger Benedict sets out his reason for producing a dedicated scale volume for viola; that up till now there has been very little published methodology specifically for the instrument. Most violists have used transcriptions of the revered violin systems set out by Flesch and/ or Galamian to aid their practice of scales. On the surface, this volume looks rather similar to those two.

The scales and arpeggios are set out in order, go through each key in turn and, as in the earlier violin books, establish a routine of skills and techniques. Benedict deploys an impressive 19 different skills which, of course, allow a practitioner to dip in and out of each routine as required. He also makes persuasive arguments that fingerings suited to violinists do not always work for the larger viola.

He suggests starting on the first finger for three-octave scales up to G flat, which ‘allows the first octave… to be played within an octave hand frame’. He has also decided to omit harmonic minor scales. His very sensible explanation for this decision is that when the awkward augmented interval is found in repertoire, it often needs to be fingered in different ways depending on context. He also suggests more shifting for double-stops, rather than using conventional violinistic finger substitutions, which can cause unnecessary and tiring tension when attempted on a larger instrument.

The real success of this scale volume is the consistent musicality of Benedict’s approach. He calls on his years of experience as an orchestral violist, and as a chamber musician, to urge the player always to think of intonation in their scale practice. He describes simply and expertly the science of Pythagorean proportions, equal temperament, and how and why to use or avoid expressive or melodic intonation.

He prints harmonies under the scales to give musical context and direction, and suggests using a tuner to act as a drone, so that practice can be done with reference to intervals rather than merely travelling note to note. It might help to create an accompanying set of tracks for these, so practitioners can work in this way more easily, without having to record themselves in advance.

Benedict set out to produce something specifically useful for a violist. It is clear to me that he has achieved more than this. As a player of both the violin and viola, I can see enormous benefits for all upper string players. Violists will love the care Benedict has taken to produce something bespoke for the larger instrument, and violinists can use their own traditional scale fingerings while working within his harmonic framework. As the great violinist Lydia Mordkovitch once said (rather forcefully): ‘Scales can be musical too!’ is new volume will inspire and provoke the process to achieve that result.

ALEX LAING

joy of Music: Discoveries from the Schott Archives Ed. Wolfgang Birtel

120PP ISBN 9783795719852 SCHOTT MUSIC £20.50

I spent a rather enjoyable rainy afternoon during lockdown roaming through this collection of archival material. It felt like a throwback to the world of endless encores and party pieces, and my feeling is that exam boards will adore this book, as it contains material for higher-grade students that will be unfamiliar but playable, and largely appealing.

Technically the level is probably ABRSM Grade 6 upwards. Many of the pieces explore the higher positions on the lower strings and, apart from Hubay’s Plaintes arabes, a Gigue by Wieniawski and Leonard’s Capricho espagnol, there is little in the way of double-stopping, although plenty of showy but playable cadenza-type material throughout.

The idea of the publication (and others in the series for different instruments - piano, flute, cello and clarinet) is to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Schott in 2020 with less familiar examples of repertoire by relatively familiar composers. Most are from the Romantic period, and the violin is put through its paces by.composers who knew what they were doing. So we have examples by violinist-composers such as Pugnani (a.real piece by him, not a Kreisler ‘classical manuscript’ and here arranged by Alfred Mo.at), Wieniawski and Beriot; and compositions originally by composers less known for their string writing where the arranger is everything, such as Chopin (arr. Friedrich Hermann), John Field (arr. Emil Kross), Gounod (arr. Adolphe Herman) and Anton Rubinstein (arr. Gustave Sandré). Berthold Tours’ Fantasy on Hänsel und Gretel (Humperdinck) and Bizet’s Carmen March arranged by Reinhardt bring us familiar tunes in.the style of the period.

Of particular interest are nuggets by Jean-Delphin Alard, whose 1852 Barcarolle shows violinistic writing in.a fluid 6/8 piece with plenty of expressive detail, and Léonard’s aforementioned Capricho espagñol - which has moments of real virtuoso passagework as well as sextuplets of 3rds and 6ths over the fingerboard.

At the end of the piano part is detailed background information on the repertoire and its composers and arrangers. This is an interesting publication, and a delightful addition to unfamiliar but showy material of a particular age. Playing through it was an immersive experience, bringing the 19th century to life. Inevitably these are examples of forgotten repertoire, but they evoke a former age and deserve exposure, rather like looking at a sepia photograph for clues to the past. How much more little-known music there must be in the archives.

ANNE INGLIS