CONCERTS

Your monthly critical round-up of performances, recordings and publications

THIS MONTH’S RECOMMENDED RECORDINGS

Our pick of the new releases

Lea Birringer: Bachian inspiration PAGE 82

Midnight moods from the Ébène Quartet PAGE 84

Sol & Pat: Ravel, Kodály and more PAGE 87

Live streams

The Setzer–Han–Finckel Trio delight in their musical partnership

HAN–SETZER–FINCKEL TRIO SHALIN LIU PERFORMANCE CENTER, ROCKPORT, MA, 17 SEPTEMBER 2021

The Han–Setzer–Finckel Trio performed at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival with an intimacy that can only come from decades married or in a quartet together. Even through the screen their mutual trust and understanding of each other was palpable, and their ensemble was stunning: every articulation meticulously matched, sounds perfectly blended, crescendos built in impeccable partnership.

It was truly remarkable to hear these musicians play together in this formation. The Beethoven ‘Ghost’ Trio op.70 no.1 moved seamlessly from tenderness to youthful energy in the Allegro. The Largo was appropriately mysterious and haunting, played with passion and nuance. The final Presto was joyful to the extent that the performers were smiling and clearly delighting in both each other and the music, which was not just refreshing but inspiring and beautiful to behold: music as it should be.

Dvořák’s ‘Dumky’ finished the programme and the opening Lento was breathtaking. While there were a few intonation issues in the Vivace of the second movement, the musicians captured the spirit wonderfully and the transitions between slow and fast tempos were elegant in every instance. The final Lento was both serene and serious, and while their interpretation of both these masterworks was not wildly imaginative, both pieces were performed with confidence, beauty, attention to detail, and terrific ensemble and balance, making for a deeply satisfying concert experience.

LEAH HOLLINGSWORTH

DOMENIC SALERNI (VIOLIN) LIVESTREAM FROM BROOKLYN, NY, 19 SEPTEMBER 2021

In a tribute to the composer and educator Earl Kim (1920–98), violinist Domenic Salerni presented a concert that ended with Kim’s 12 Caprices for Solo Violin (1980). This was my first encounter with them and it is not hyperbole to say that these gems should be in the minds and under the fingers of many violinists. A world apart from the 24 Paganini fireballs, Kim’s miniatures are quieter, sometimes meditative – and always compelling. A member of the Attacca Quartet, Salerni (below) brought years of chamber music intimacy to the table. Most engaging were no.7, marked ‘Teneramente’, which ends with a stratospheric ascent on the E string, and no.8, ‘Risoluto’, with a repeated pattern like an insistent child trying to get one’s attention.

The afternoon opened with Three Places in Vicenza (2021), a world premiere by the violinist’s father Paul Salerni, who studied with Kim at Harvard and offered reminiscences in short Zoom discussions before and after the concert. All three sections showed the violinist’s lustre and nimble fingerwork (not to mention, his coordination of a foot pedal with a digital score – increasingly the norm for musicians who perform contemporary works). As a gift from father to son, the score handsomely showed off the skills of both.

DAVID GODDARD

In between came another premiere, Pastorale/ Galop (2021) by Louis Karchin, who also studied with Kim and founded the League of Composers/ ISCM, which presented the afternoon. The wistful and slightly reflective Pastorale eventually yields to the increasingly virtuosic Galop, before some of the opening gentle phrases return for an ethereal ending. As in the previous works, Salerni’s exactitude was gripping.

BRUCE HODGES

ARI STREISFELD (VIOLIN) PHILLIP BUSH (PIANO) 206 RECITAL HALL, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, SC, 31 AUGUST 2021

For this faculty recital, Ari Streisfeld (formerly with the Jack Quartet) chose a programme of four works by Jewish composers, all more or less coeval. Streisfeld and Bush played it all with satisfying teamwork and characterisation, although more colour and brilliance would have intensified it. The Suite from Erich Korngold’s 1918 Incidental Music to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing was the opener, its four movements depicting various scenes: ‘Maiden in the Bridal Chamber’ (opened by lute-like strumming); ‘March of the Watch’ (Dogberry and Verges); ‘Garden Scene’; and a distinctly Viennese idea of a hornpipe.

The 1949 Phantasy by Arnold Schoenberg (who, like Korngold, resettled in California) was heard next. The violin part was written first; however, Streisfeld took pains in his prefatory remarks to claim an equal partnership for the piano, which he said in some ways had the more difficult of the two parts. He and Bush dispatched its single movement with distinctive episodes in a highly assured and authoritative manner. Ernest Bloch’s First Suite for solo violin was written in 1958, the penultimate year of his life. Its linked movements mix rhapsodic style with explorations of atonality. The third movement inhabits a sort of neo-Bachian space.

The Sonate by Rosy Wertheim (1888–1949) is by a composer (descended from an important Dutch banking family) who settled in Paris in 1929, and was acquainted with the city’s leading composers of the 1920s and 30s. She successfully evaded the Nazis during the Second World War by hiding in a variety of small Dutch villages. The Sonate is one of only a few of her approximately 90 works to be published. It bears many Gallic touches in a mostly neo-Classical framework that was pleasing but impersonal.

DENNIS ROONEY

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Berlin

PATRICIA KOPATCHINSKAJA (VIOLIN) BERLIN PHILHARMONIC/KIRILL PETRENKO PHILHARMONIE 17 SEPTEMBER 2021

Karl Amadeus Hartmann wrote his Concerto funèbre in 1939, in the wake of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and as a coded act of protest against it. The piece begins with the violin quoting – almost without accompaniment – the Hussite hymn, ‘You who are warriors of God’; in her debut appearance as the Berlin Philharmonic’s artist-in-residence, Patricia Kopatchinskaja intoned it with an unbearably moving sound devoid of vibrato, as if humming to herself, so that one had to strain to hear her. In the Adagio she let her dynamic range grow all the way to an almost painfully crunching chord at the top of the fingerboard as if bearing witness to her own dictum (quoted in the programme book) that this music ‘bleeds’.

Hartmann originally called this piece Musik der Trauer (‘Music of mourning’), and it indeed strongly recalls Hindemith’s similarly titled composition from a few years earlier, also scored for string orchestra. This was particularly noticeable in the ‘funeral march’ rhythms of its second movement and in the soloist’s cadenzas that separate the verses of the final section’s chorale, where Kopatchinskaja’s sound became sensuously golden. Unique to Hartmann’s conception is the vertiginous ‘Dance of Death’ that makes up the third movement, which Kopatchinskaja and the Berliners turned into a rhythmically obsessive tour de force. The orchestra’s principal conductor Kirill Petrenko backed his soloist with unobtrusive empathy throughout. After the interval, sorely needed after such an emotionally draining experience as the Hartmann had been, Petrenko conjured from his orchestra a typically clear-headed, transparent reading of Stravinsky’s Firebird in its original, brightly coloured 1910 garb.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

London

GAUTIER CAPUÇON (CELLO) WIGMORE HALL 14 SEPTEMBER 2021

Gautier Capuçon opened this solo recital with what one might normally expect as an encore: an exquisite performance of The Song of the Birds, arranged by Casals. He followed it with one of the works Casals did so much to put into the repertoire: Bach’s Cello Suite no.1 in G major. This was mainly a happy account, with the central Sarabande sombre but moving forward, balanced by an exuberant Courante, graceful minuets and the final Gigue a jolly dance. The first of Dutilleux’s 3 Strophes sur le nom de Sacher, ‘Un pocco indeciso’, had a strong narrative shape, and there were clear-toned harmonics amid the complexities of the Andante sostenuto. The scurrying final Vivace was full of pizzicato high-jinks.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the Berlin Philharmonic

STEPHAN RABOLD

After the interval Capuçon introduced Kodály’s horribly challenging Sonata for solo cello op.8 with the plea ‘Wish me luck’. There was no need (or maybe it worked): he was magisterial. His technical command almost had a personality of its own. In the first movement there was muscularity, with a big vibrato, and a great emotional range. He brought rhythmic flexibility and a sense of dramatic improvisation to the central Adagio, and wildness to the final Allegro molto vivace, maintaining clarity in extremis.

TIM HOMFRAY

ESTHER YOO (VIOLIN) YEKWON SUNWOO (PIANO) WIGMORE HALL 20 SEPTEMBER 2021

There seemed to be two Esther Yoos in this concert, one who played sonatas from the music and one who played from memory. In the first half she gave muscular performances of Beethoven’s C minor Sonata op.30 no.2 and Debussy’s G minor Sonata.

She was vibrant-toned in Beethoven’s opening Allegro con brio and delicate in the following Adagio cantabile, while maintaining her big sound. In the Scherzo again there was strength, with crisp rhythms, and the final Allegro was urgent and driving.

There was plenty of colour in the Debussy, with a kaleidoscopic palette in the central Intermède and an almost grotesque intensity of sound at times in the Finale. But she seemed glued to the music, and there was little feeling of intimacy or communication with the audience. Or sometimes with Yekwon Sunwoo – there were frequent little lapses in ensemble. In Strauss’s E flat major Sonata she seemed more in her element, with grand rhetorical gestures in the first movement, light and supple playing in the second and splendid bravura in the finale. Sunwoo was superb throughout.

But at the start of the second half she played Kreisler’s solo Recitativo und Scherzo-Caprice op.6, and as an encore she performed Vieuxtemps’s solo Souvenir d’Amérique, variations on Yankee Doodle op.17, both from memory. Now she played to the audience, smiling, relaxed and obviously enjoying herself, and what a difference there was.

TIM HOMFRAY

NICOLA BENEDETTI (VIOLIN) BARBICAN 23 SEPTEMBER 2021

While the likes of Lang, Wang and Trifonov routinely work the large venues in solo recital, there are few violinists who can match their pulling power. Nicola Benedetti is one of the exceptions and in her Barbican recital she embraced the audience with her friendly, informal introductions – even self-effacingly excusing herself before the start of the second half after noticing the foot-pedal controller for her tablet reader needed a battery change.

Nicola Benedetti performs solo at the Barbican

MARK ALLAN/BARBICAN

But her expression was less commanding in Bach’s D minor Partita, which neither quite radiated outwards nor drew us in. Though physically a more intimate venue than most large halls, acoustically the Barbican swallowed up what, in other spaces, might have been a more soulful and magical Sarabande.

On the flip side, it allowed the star violinist to take the Gigue at a giddying lick and, in the Chaconne, enabled us to behold her laser-sharp string-crossing.

The second half brought, as well as a costume change, a new sound-world in Ysaÿe’s Sonata no.5, in which Benedetti relished its technical challenges and its spirited ‘Danse rustique’. The dance theme, begun in the Partita, continued in Wynton Marsalis’s five-movement Fiddle Dance Suite, offering a kaleidoscopic profusion of styles, if not always of ideas, that underlined another Benedetti singularity: a rare stylistic range.

EDWARD BHESANIA

DIOTIMA QUARTET, MARK SIMPSON (CLARINET) KINGS PLACE 30 SEPTEMBER 2021

The Diotima Quartet had come ‘all the way from Paris’, it was announced from the stage, and there was indeed a frisson of novelty to this Kings Place recital in this time of red zones and closed borders. For starters, the D major Quartet D74 by the teenage Schubert: an unaccountable rarity in concert, blowing away autumnal cobwebs here in an account of exemplary freshness and vitality.

On stage, the proto-symphonic transformation of Schubert’s fizzing ideas supplied an elegantly Italianate set design for the dynamic nature of the Diotima in performance. Leader Yun-Peng Zhao and cellist Pierre Morlet maintained a coolly impassive air; in between, second violinist Constance Ronzatti and violist Franck Chevalier seemed to hang on every note of their respective musical partners.

On this evidence I would watch and listen to the Diotima play anything, especially Haydn. On this occasion their collective transparency of tone made an exquisite, polychromatic foil to the clarinettist (and composer) Mark Simpson for the first performance of Alchymia by Thomas Adès. The new quintet lives up to its title in the uncanny overlapping scales of the opening movement, and more widely in the burnished glow of restoration that he bestows on Elizabethan melodies in the middle movements. The final round-dance ascends to a kind of Mahlerian nirvana in the closing pages with the unsettling rapture that has become an Adès hallmark.

No less original in its way was the second-half account of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. Simpson and the Diotima continually cut against the conventional grain of warm retrospection in the piece, underlining instead the lonely passion that still burns in late Brahms. A free, Schumann-like flexibility of phrasing in the second movement made of it a recitative and arioso on an imagined text of desolation, casting a wan light on the Expressionist flurries of the scherzo and the baleful sighs of the finale: a remarkable and discomfiting experience.

PETER QUANTRILL