CONCERTS

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

A radical Lark from Pekka Kuusisto

PHOTOS CHRIS CHRISTODOULOU

London

Peter Quantrill hears some of the more recent additions to the string repertoire at this year’s BBC Proms season

Henry Wood, founder of the Proms, was always determined to introduce his audiences to the best of new music, whether or not they were likely to enjoy it on first listening. It seems appropriate that the most striking string concerto performances in the 2022 season were of late 20th- and 21st-century works, beginning with the Viola Concerto composed in 2013 by Sir James MacMillan (18 July).

One ill-informed criticism levelled at new music used to be that it allowed no room for a musician’s personality, but you could hardly mistake Lawrence Power’s sound for anyone else’s, more ardent than plangent, projecting easily across the stretches of the Royal Albert Hall and defying viola-concerto clichés of unrelieved melancholy. The form sustained its length: a brief prelude with the sense of an ending, a quick argument and pursuit interrupted by a lyrical hymn, then a rhythmically tense finale that kept its powder dry for a euphoric climax.

The support of the BBC Philharmonic under Juanjo Mena seemed attentive enough – both the conductor and the concerto itself were late replacements – but Power’s shaping of the solo part left the comparatively banal orchestral support in the shade. His encore opened the envelope of expression still further in a cross-string evocation of bells by Johann Paul von Westhoff that anticipated the D minor Chaconne of Bach.

A Sunday matinee Prom on 14 August was notable less for its sliver of concertante action – asongwithout-words violin transcription of the radiant apotheosis to Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’amour de loin (2000) – than for the all-round excellence of the Northern Sinfonia’s string playing. As both soloist and orchestral leader, Maria Włoszczowska drew a memorably dynamic response from her colleagues – hushed but tingling with detail in the Saariaho, sure-footed and urgently expressive for symphonies by Haydn and Beethoven. Dinis Sousa’s conducting showed a modern mastery of Classical style.

To browse through more than a decade of The Strad ’s recording reviews, visit www.thestrad.com/reviews

Potent Schnittke from Tabea Zimmermann

The main evening Prom that day brought a striking contrast of style in Jennifer Koh’s playing of Procession, the new concerto written for her by Missy Mazzoli. Where some of MacMillan’s orchestral eruptions reminded me of a blunted Ted Hughes line, Koh and Mazzoli between them evoked something of Emily Dickinson’s artless wonder – and her economy of expression, in a five-movement form spanning barely more than 20 minutes.

Energy and astringency compensated for Koh’s relatively thin tone, apparently modelled like the concerto on a Stravinskian neo-Classical scale. The faltering steps of the concerto’s central still point seemed to belong not always to the score but to some fuzzy coordination of a slimmed-down Philharmonia Orchestra by its extrovert chief, Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Nevertheless, Procession transcended its pandemic origins in a reworking of minimalist and Romantic-concerto tropes with sufficient individuality to reward repeated listening to the BBC broadcast (and, who knows, a recording).

On 26 August the Pekka Kuusisto show rolled into town with a predictably radical take on The Lark Ascending. Paying heed to Vaughan Williams’s liberal sul tasto markings, he kept a capacity audience on the edge of their seats at times with the merest feather of tone. Some pure-tone, superficially uninflected phrasing of the long lines and then folksy, quasi-improvised handling of the central interlude directed our ears back to a prelapsarian world as innocent of Romanticism as the opening paragraphs of the Tallis Fantasia, though in this case more self-consciously rustic in character, and all the more bittersweet for its evocation of a lost Eden. Birdsong resurfaced on speed in the third ‘Skylark’ movement of the 2020 Märchentänze by Thomas Adès, newly presented in orchestral guise by the Finnish Radio SO and Nicholas Collon. The Adès world of uncanny purity and sudden dislocation seems made for Kuusisto, but perhaps the most sincerely inward and straightforwardly affecting of his solo spots arrived with the encore, a Sibelius Humoresque dedicated to the memories of his recently late mother and brother.

A cloud of irony and uncertainty over how seriously to take the music never fully cleared from the Viola Concerto of Alfred Schnittke in spite of the complete authority of Tabea Zimmermann’s performance on 4 September. A wicked cartoon in the programme depicted the composer as a musical chemist, pouring a tincture of Beethoven into a suspension of ‘Pseudo-Baroque pastiches’ and ‘Banal popular tunes’: quite so. Backed by the Berlin Philharmonic on top form under Daniel Harding, however, Zimmermann sustained the slender thread of the long final Largo and brought impassioned sincerity to its intimations of extinction.

Personal conviction was also key to the success of the Violin Concerto by Wynton Marsalis, given the following night by its first and so far only interpreter, Nicola Benedetti. Flavours of an Ivesian parade, Scottish folk, bluegrass, big band and much more are liberally poured into a diffuse fourmovement structure, placing heavy reliance on the soloist to hang its episodes together with the kind of quicksilver alternation between pure and dirty modes required by Prokofiev. She went all out, almost but never quite drowned by a punchy, Hollywood orchestration in the hands of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Thomas Søndergård. As a vehicle for Benedetti’s powers of communication, it could hardly be improved.

PETER QUANTRILL

Edinburgh

David Kettle reports from the Edinburgh International Festival, where eclectic chamber music rubbed shoulders with early works

There was a greater sense of expectation than ever before in the build-up to Edinburgh’s August festivals this year. Not only had there been three long years of pandemic restrictions since the International Festival (and the Fringe, for that matter) had delivered full-scale, full-capacity, indoor events, but both festivals were also celebrating their respective 75th anniversaries.

You might have expected lavish, no-holds-barred celebrations. What emerged, however, was quite a lot of worry and hesitancy, at least on the part of audiences – as demonstrated in the festival’s opening Queen’s Hall chamber concert on 6 August, which was barely half full. Though the rather dour, seriousminded programme from the Philharmonia Chamber Players probably didn’t help. There were EIF connections: the opening 1971 String Trio came from Austrian émigré Hans Gál, himself one of the EIF’s founders in 1947, and Strauss’s Metamorphosen (heard in its string septet version) of course commemorated the wartime destruction that prompted the founding of the festival in the first place.

However, these were strongly characterised, vividly projected accounts that didn’t shy away from the works’ challenges – Gál’s sometimes thorny Schoenbergian motivic writing, and Strauss’s sheer weight of emotion – instead tackling them with shining clarity and transparency. There was an enjoyable balance, too, between the players’ individual musical personalities and corporate identity, especially in the three contrasting approaches from violinist (and Philharmonia leader) Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay, violist Yukiko Ogura and cellist Karen Stephenson in the Gál Trio, so much so that you’d be convinced that this was a long-established chamber group. Those absent listeners didn’t know what they were missing.

Revelatory Baroque rarities from Bojan Čičić, Ruiqi Ren and Rachell Ellen Wong

RYAN BUCHANAN

There were barely any more in the audience three days later, when the BBC Singers were joined for two unusual items by violinist (and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra leader) Laura Samuel. She soared convincingly in the touching, folk-like obbligato fiddle tune that rounds off Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’s choral Ancient Prairie. Samuel was also the captivating soloist in the perhaps more surprising reimagining of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending for violin and choir by Paul Drayton. It stayed almost entirely faithful to the string orchestra original, save for the addition of George Meredith’s eponymous poem text to a later sung section; it proved a thoroughly convincing, and very moving, reappraisal of the orchestral warhorse, Samuel’s sinewy, lithe solo line adding a decidedly human dimension to the sometimes otherworldly humming and aah-ing from the voices.

By the time the Pavel Haas Quartet took to the Queen’s Hall stage on 23 August, a packed house suggested that audience confidence had returned. And the foursome delivered a scorching performance, bristling with energy and enthusiasm, though gratifyingly measured in Schubert’s monumental G major Quartet D887, whose restless wavering between major and minor felt less like the composer’s private conflicts between joy and despair, more like mighty collisions between elemental forces. The PHQ players opened with a bold, confident Haydn op.76 no.1, but their account of Martinů’s Seventh Quartet, Concerto da camera, was the concert’s real revelation. It dashed past you with muscular verve and a slightly manic quality, its neo-classical clarity sharply etched, its imitative lines teased apart, and with cellist Peter Jarůšek providing a gloriously rich, passionate, keening solo in the slow movement.

The following day saw a performance by harpsichordist Richard Egarr and friends. Egarr joked that we got pretty much the entire early Baroque Italian and German repertoire for three violins and continuo – quite a narrow, even restrictive focus for a morning’s music, perhaps, but the results were revelatory. There were off-stage echo effects from Biagio Marini, orchestral-scale richness from Giovanni Gabrieli and even a gloriously danceable, light-footed Pachelbel Canon and Gigue, with the three period violinists – Bojan Čičić, Ruiqi Ren and Rachell Ellen Wong – swapping generously between parts and playing with a truly vocal sense of expressivity and suppleness. The sextet of players – with Egarr joined by theorbo player Alex McCartney and gambist Jonathan Rees in an equally supple continuo threesome – breathed and navigated the pieces’ melodic shapes as one, responding effortlessly to the music’s sometimes surprising swerves in direction. It was a concert of seldom heard music (well, mostly), in accounts that brought it to compelling life, and one of the International Festival’s string music highlights for 2022.

Berlin

DMITRY SITKOVETSKY (VIOLIN) ANDREI GRIDCHUK (VIOLA) DAVID GERINGAS (CELLO) BLACKMORE’S 13 AUGUST 2022

An off-centre outfit that describes itself as ‘Berlin’s music room’, Blackmore’s certainly is an address worth watching. It’s run by violinist Dylan Blackmore and former Berlin Philharmonic violist Wilfried Strehle, and they regularly hold masterclasses and chamber music concerts that might qualify as Berlin’s best-kept musical secret. The cosy location was fully packed for a summery performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations as arranged for string trio by Dmitry Sitkovetsky. Joining the arranger himself were two Berlin-based musicians: the Deutsche Oper Berlin’s principal viola Andrei Gridchuk and former Hochschule für Musik cello professor David Geringas.

Sitkovetsky’s transcription was made almost 40 years ago, but he has kept revisiting and revising it over two recordings and countless concert performances. Having played the piece myself, at the concert under review I noticed several small differences from the printed parts. Afterwards, Sitkovetsky told me that he still considers his arrangement a work in progress! The violinist played Bach’s intricate embellishments with the greatest spontaneity and agogic freedom, leading on his colleagues unwaveringly and by the slightest means – sometimes a raised eyebrow was all that was needed. Spiccato was unanimously employed in ever-changing degrees of sharpness – areminder that the transcription was inspired by Glenn Gould’s playing. As melodic lines passed seamlessly from one instrument to the next, the individual timbres of Sitkovetsky’s Strad, Gridchuk’s Testore and Geringas’s Guadagnini came to the fore. The hour-long concert seemed to be over in no time; of course, there were no encores, but I for one wouldn’t have minded if they had started all over again!

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

Improvisatory élan from Sitkovetsky and friends

BERLIN PHOTO ROBERT CARUS. VERBIER PHOTO EVGENY EVTYUKHOV

Switzerland

MIKLÓS PERÉNYI (CELLO) FINGHIN COLLINS (PIANO) VERBIER FESTIVAL 25, 28 JULY 2022 To say Miklós Perényi and Finghin Collins – the latter an eleventh-hour stand-in for an indisposed András Schiff – had tough competition on the evening they opened their Verbier Festival Beethoven cycle is something of an understatement, when a short walk away Gianandrea Noseda was conducting Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera with a glittering cast topped by tenor-of-the-moment Freddie De Tommaso. So it said a lot for the reputation of this former pupil of Casals, these days more often teaching than performing, that the church was still comfortably full.

Intimate Beethoven from Miklós Perényi

In Beethoven’s First Cello Sonata, Perényi was elegant but emotionally measured, prizing lightness and flow in his bowing choices (initial accompanying chugs were four-to-a-bow, for instance) and visually undemonstrative. He seemed more in his own world than audience-aware, but invitingly so. Real fortes were absent – here and in the Third and Fourth Sonatas and the Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen Variations – but rhythmic energy was crisp and sure, matched by an attentive Collins. They rewarded a standing ovation with the character-laden ‘Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen’ Variations – ateaser for their second concert. This, a morning recital, saw Perényi seemingly with more physical energy, attacking the merry final rondo of no.2 with playful, on point vim. Add joyously sung-out lines for the arrangement of the Horn Sonata op.17, and an especially atmospheric approach to the Allegro fugato section of no.5’s finale, and the cycle ended on a high.

CHARLOTTE GARDNER