CONCERTS

THIS MONTH’S RECOMMENDED RECORDINGS

Our pick of the new releases

Elegant Chopin from Anne Gastinel and Claire Désert PAGE 90

ARC Ensemble discovers Klebanov’s thrilling music PAGE 92

The Spektral Quartet plays new Anna Thorváldsdottir works PAGE 95

London

BBC PROMS 2021

ROYAL ALBERT HALL, LONDON, AUGUST 2021

Peter Quantrill attends the cream of the strings crop during this year’s Proms season

Guy Johnston takes a lyrical route through Saint-Saëns

ALL PHOTOS BBC/CHRIS CHRISTODOULOU

You don’t have to be Rostropovich or Yo-Yo Ma to project into the Royal Albert Hall – but it helps, most of the time. Guy Johnston (2 August) took a different tack, launching a sequence of cello concertos at this season’s BBC Proms by taking a lyrical rather than heroic route through the familiar yet perennially underrated pleasures of the First Concerto by Saint-Saëns. Even the stormy opening declamation yielded gracefully to reflection in Johnston’s relaxed and flexible phrasing, which made a strong case for the work as essentially neoclassical rather than Romantic in spirit. Discreetly pointed support from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales brought Johnston into elegant dialogue with the winds in the central waltz section, and Ryan Bancroft’s conducting underlined the momentum and unity generated by the through-composed Konzertstück form (resembling and perhaps modelled on Schumann’s Concerto) with its tight network of related themes.

A week later (9 August), Johannes Moser struck a much more combative note at the start of the Elgar Concerto. It’s almost always instructive to hear non-native musicians coming to Elgar’s music free from presumed notions of what ‘Englishness’ sounds like. Rhetorical strategies such as stretching out the introduction’s transition into the main Allegro served to strengthen formal bonds to early Romantic models for the concerto’s writing in Mendelssohn (including some lovely double clarinet writing and playing from the Bournemouth SO) and Schumann again. The Scherzo almost came off its wheels at a couple of points, but Moser recovered poise with a strongly marked Adagio that ignored the current fashion for under-playing it (to escape the shadow of du Pré?) and took account of the concerto within a setting that has become its spiritual home.

By contrast, Walton’s Cello Concerto felt ill at ease in the space (12 August), at least once past the magically luminous opening which sets a high bar that the rest of the work almost never meets in performance. Steven Isserlis grappled with the solo writing rather than conquering or defining its restless arcs. In an otherwise moving farewell concert for its principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski, the London Philharmonic seemed also to fight a losing battle not to dominate its soloist, especially in the cinematic, vamp-until-ready action of the Scherzo.

The elusive rhapsody of the finale remained elusive, its episodes always promising but never delivering access to the kind of oblique but deep feeling already perfected in the two earlier string concertos.

Timothy Ridout’s uninhibited mastery of Walton’s Viola Concerto (27 August) served to make the point more eloquently than any words. Here was Walton, gruff Lancastrian poet and offhand cocktail-party wit in all his resolved contradictions. Scaled up to the hall, Ridout’s tone retained a glowing core even in the Scherzo’s folksy eruptions, sufficiently extrovert to give the BBC SO the expressive space and volume to register the accompaniment’s gawky charm and hints of a pastoralism not often associated with the composer. Ridout then gave the encore of the season in his dazzling dispatch of the penultimate movement from Hindemith’s Solo Viola Sonata.

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An unusually high hit-rate among this year’s premieres and commissions included no string concertos, but Respighi’s Concerto gregoriano is enough of a rarity to have been ‘new music’ for almost everyone attending Sayaka Shoji’s performance (4 August). Launching his tenure as music director of the Royal Philharmonic

Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko had cleverly preceded it with the Tallis Fantasia of Vaughan Williams, giving a timely context and sturdy backbone to Respighi’s radiant transformation of chant melodies. Shoji (left) struck a fine balance between neo-medieval purity and ardent late Romanticism with a full palette of vibrato colours and a rapt sostenuto that served both ends of the concerto’s idiom. Tiny in stature, Shoji owned the stage and filled the hall: she has played the Concerto gregoriano with several different orchestras, and her experience showed in every bar despite the solo part’s relative lack of overt virtuosity. An early London return for both her and the concerto would be more than welcome.

Like Shoji, Liza Ferschtman was making her debut at the festival. A short-notice replacement for Jennifer Pike in the Sibelius Concerto (10 August), the Dutch violinist showed some nerves at a couple of scrambled points, but her strength of charisma and interpretative vision was otherwise plain to hear in a performance of persuasive extremes: silken in the opening entry, roughening to hessian in a daringly rhapsodic cadenza, before haring off in the first-movement coda like one of Sibelius’s mythic dryads.

A short-notice Proms debut for Liza Ferschtman

The BBC Philharmonic’s otherwise closely moulded support then faltered at the start of the Adagio, but Ferschtman put it back on track with the intense focus of her opening phrase, shaping the movement as an operatic scene-and-aria in the tradition of Tchaikovsky’s canzonetta for his concerto. Ferschtman had talked beforehand about the finale, not in terms of Donald Tovey’s shopworn ‘polonaise for polar bears’ but as a Finnish tango: elegant and Nordic but still smouldering and nostalgic, and she gave it everything, leaving nothing in the dressing room or the rehearsal studio, and suffering a few more dicey moments along the way.

As for tango, Joshua Bell brought the real deal to the Proms later in the season (25 August) with the Four Seasons of Vivaldi and Piazzolla. No shortage of polish here in Bell’s trademark legato, florid ornamentation, or the cultivated response of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields: the upholstered collective sonority, chunky harpsichord continuo and deferentially English response to Vivaldi’s extravagant naturalisms spirited me back to the reassuring comfort of its huge Philips LP catalogue.

The interleaved Four Seasons of Buenos Aires drew sharper and more piquant colours from Bell and the ensemble. Still a size or two larger than ideal for a properly edgy Piazzolla sound, even in Leonid Desyatnikov’s concerto grosso transcription, the Academy nonetheless swung and crunched its way through ‘Verano Porteño’ before ‘Otoño Porteño’ elicited palpable heat both from Bell and principal cellist Caroline Dale. To hanker after a keener ache in ‘Invierno Porteño’ would have been to miss the point, when Piazzolla’s quotations from Vivaldi were played in character with the well-fed Academy sound in the originals. A soulful, soft-focus arrangement of Gershwin’s Summertime belatedly jolted Bell and his colleagues into the most rapt and expressively urgent playing of the evening.

Edinburgh

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL AND EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FRINGE VARIOUS VENUES, EDINBURGH, AUGUST 2021

Patricia Kopatchinskaja: blistering in Beethoven

RYAN BUCHANAN

David Kettle samples the best of the Scottish festivals’ strings-based programmes in 2021, imaginatively refreshed and distilled for post-pandemic times

To say that 2021 has been an unusual year for Edinburgh’s festivals would be – well, it would simply line them up alongside almost every other arts event devastated by the pandemic.

But after online performances and light shows last year, in 2021 they re-emerged, smaller, more cautious, with less of the flamboyant, anything-goes attitude they’re notorious for, but – whisper it – perhaps all the better for that.

At the Edinburgh International Festival, the decision was made months back to host live music in open-air, semi-outdoor pavilions (unkindly, though rather accurately, dubbed polytunnels) in three locations across the city, with judicious amplification so subtle you’d hardly notice.

The results have been unconventional but very rewarding, certainly in the smaller space erected in the quad of the University of Edinburgh’s neoclassical Old College. Even when Scotland’s capital threw the worst of its summer weather at a concert – as happened with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Joonas Ahonen on 9 August – things just about held together, even if the battering rain on the plastic covering somewhat obscured the violinist’s quieter passages. It was already a disrupted programme: what had been intended as Schubert, Brahms and Janáček with Fazil Say became two Beethoven violin sonatas – nos.7 and 9, the ‘Kreutzer’ – with Ahonen, who was on immaculate, perceptive form throughout. Kopatchinskaja delivered blistering, defiant performances, her every phrase interrogated for meaning (probably a little excessively to some tastes), though she never lost sight of Beethoven’s grander architecture. The finale of her ‘Kreutzer’

Sonata, in fact, felt like a delirious release of all the pent-up energy and worry from earlier in the concert. In between, the duo gave a thoroughly convincing account of Schoenberg’s thorny Phantasy: Kopatchinskaja’s micro-expressivity really came into its own in the serial master’s gnomic but teemingly detailed solo line.

The following week, the Munich-based Goldmund Quartet (19 August) made its International Festival debut, and, though there was no doubting the foursome’s technical accomplishment and smooth, stylish sound, their lavish rubato pulled their opening Haydn B minor Quartet op.33 no.1 in all directions, making for a rather ear-bewildering start. They were far more persuasive in the main meat of their concert –

Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ Quartet – though even here it felt like they had a point to prove, or an individual stamp to brand on the chamber warhorse. Their opening movement was pushed so hard it fell somewhere between gripping and exhausting, and their closing tarantella went at such a lick that their otherwise immaculate ensemble felt somewhat under threat. It was as far from a workaday performance as you could imagine, and if they set out to challenge and provoke, they undoubtedly achieved that.

In the festival’s closing days, the all-standing (bar cellist Claudius Herrmann) Gringolts Quartet (26 August) gave similarly hard-driven accounts of Mozart and Dvořák that posed more questions than they answered. There was an almost claustrophobic intensity to the opening Mozart D minor Quartet K173, as though we were unable to escape the sudden contrasts, dense rubato and unsettlingly improvisatory feeling of the musicians’ performance, superbly articulated and balanced though it was. Their Dvořák Quartet no.13 was more joyful and earthy, and provided more opportunities to enjoy the players’ astonishing attention to detail: even the movements’ closing chords were elegantly shaped and nuanced.

Driven playing in Haydn and Schubert by the Goldmund Quartet

GOLDMUND PHOTO RYAN BUCHANAN. KINNARIS PHOTO COURTESY KINNARIS QUINTET

The festival’s orchestral concerts took place in a larger pavilion in the leafy grounds of the Edinburgh Academy Junior School, which provided an expansive stage for the eleven-strong Benedetti Baroque Orchestra, fronted by Nicola Benedetti herself (14 August). It was the first in a trio of concerts showcasing the Scottish-born violinist – followed by a solo recital of virtuoso showpieces, then Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale – and it proved an exceptional display of Benedetti’s rich but buoyant approach to Baroque violin music, in this case mainly Vivaldi. There was vividly characterful playing from the whole ensemble, which behaved very much as an extended chamber group, with cues and reactions jumping from instrument to instrument. The turbulent storm of Benedetti’s closing ‘Summer’ from The Four Seasons proved an appropriate reflection of the festival’s opening days, especially in the force and vigour, almost violence, with which she delivered the piece. Nonetheless, as in the stately earlier B minor Concerto RV386 and the scurrying eagerness of RV211, Benedetti ensured a vivid sense of musical storytelling amid the freedom and suppleness of her accounts.

Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto has almost become Sol Gabetta’s musical calling card, but there was an absolute absence of playing by numbers in her performance with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Elim Chan (16 August). It was a joy from start to finish, fresh and sparkling, muscular but lyrical, and played with such nimbleness in articulation and vibrato that it was tempting to sit back and simply marvel at her technical prowess.But Gabetta clearly meant every last note of the Concerto, and there was equally persuasive backing from a lithe RSNO under Chan’s incisive direction.

If the International Festival has been smaller in 2021, the Edinburgh Fringe has offered just a fraction of its usual overwhelming plethora of events. Nonetheless, there were some musical gems among them. Edinburgh-based clarinettist Calum Robertson had assembled a foursome of excellent soloists for a performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time in the intimate St Vincent’s Chapel, Stockbridge (16 August), and it achieved a truly spiritual intensity – one no doubt aided by the long-awaited return to live performance for many of those in the space. Alongside Robertson and powerful pianist Sean Jackson, violinist Tom Hankey and cellist Christoff Fourie excelled, both passionate, superbly controlled and immensely moving in their respective ‘Louange’ solo movements, even if their tempos were a little on the brisk side for the sense of the infinite Messiaen was after.

Alongside the classical riches, there was plenty of traditional Scottish music on offer, with an almost daily thread of late-night performances in the International Festival’s Old College pavilion. Among many highlights, Glasgow’s all-female Kinnaris Quintet – comprising fiddlers Aileen Reid, Laura Wilkie and Fiona MacAskill alongside guitarist Jenn Butterworth and mandolin player Laura-Beth Salter – stood out for sheer verve, inventiveness and complexity of their offerings (12 August).

Using centuries-old folk tunes alongside bangup-to-date new compositions, they mined their unusual combination of instruments for every conceivable textural variation, from the acerbic to the soulful, the lavish to the angular, pushing trad sounds as far as they can go. It was compelling, provocative and beguiling, and a true string highlight in a quieter, though no less rich, festival.