CONCERTS

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

Berlin

Keeping it in the family: Carolin Widmann plays her brother Jörg’s Second Violin Concerto

Chiaroscuro Quartet: revelatory Beethoven PAGE 88

Probing Schumann from Isabelle Faust and friends PAGE 91

A beguiling solo debut from Rakhi Singh PAGE 92

MARTIN WALZ

MUSIKFEST BERLIN

Carlos María Solare hears some gems at the Berlin Philharmonie, as part of the capital’s annual festival

One of the city’s most prestigious musical events, Musikfest Berlin regularly provides a mouthwatering choice of artists and repertoire to kick-start the new season. Coincidentally, this year’s most interesting strings-related concerts happened within a few days of one another. Inspired by Alban Gerhardt’s ‘unique abilities’, Unsuk Chin’s Cello Concerto was seven years in the making; after its premiere at the 2009 Proms, it underwent two major revisions. Having first heard about the piece from its enthusiastic dedicatee, I was happy to catch up with it in a performance with Alisa Weilerstein and the Staatskapelle Berlin conducted by the soloist’s husband, Rafael Payare (8 September). Chin’s treatment of the cello – and of orchestral instruments in general – is highly personal, with playability not particularly high on her priority list. The result is an unusually wide tonal palette – the score lists 30 different percussion instruments – that the conductor was consistently successful in bringing out.

From the start, when the solo line materialises out of the harps’ harmonics and goes on to undertake some unconventionally conceived chords and runs over four and more octaves, Weilerstein evinced a natural-sounding virtuosity, taking everything comfortably in her stride. Nonchalantly slapping the fingerboard, she easily solved some intricate doublestopping over a pedal point and was always eloquent in a piece that takes its inspiration from a Korean form of musical story-telling. Weilerstein fully lived up to this premise with emphatic parlando phrases, a kaleidoscopic vibrato and a tone that was by turns fragile and strongly determined. In her hands, Chin’s concerto was a musical adventure on a par with Mahler’s Fifth, which concluded the concert in a somewhat indulgent but exciting reading.

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Just 24 hours later, the Berlin Philharmonic introduced its new artist-in-residence, Jörg Widmann, as conductor, composer and clarinet virtuoso.

After Con brio, a short orchestral meditation on Beethoven’s music, there followed Widmann’s Second Violin Concerto, written in 2018 for his sister Carolin Widmann, who was also the soloist on this occasion. The piece’s first movement, called ‘Una ricerca’ (A search), occupies itself with various ways of bringing forth sound from the instrument: the soloist begins by bowing on the instrument’s waist, tonelessly passing over the strings. This quest continues throughout the following movements (‘Romance’ and ‘Mobile’), which eclectically touch upon very different sound worlds: Classical sequential phrases are clad in succulent Hollywoodesque harmonies, gently parodying the genre’s Romantic warhorses; there follows an interlude for percussion alone, while the concerto’s coda suggests a stylised can-can.

Carolin Widmann, since childhood her brother’s adviser in all things strings, made a convincing case for the piece, realising its maverick instrumental effects with an enthusiasm that occasionally made one fear for her Guadagnini’s integrity. I couldn’t help wondering whether Widmann was aware of Paul Hindemith’s notorious marking, ‘beauty of tone is of secondary importance’; even in the work’s more obviously melodious sections, this ingredient was in conspicuously short supply.

I was reminded of the soloist’s string-crossing entry in the Widmann when Vilde Frang began Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto two days later on the same stage. The four-note motif evolved seamlessly from open strings to stopped 5ths thanks to Frang’s careful gauging of tonal intensity and vibrato. Under Vladimir Jurowski’s careful watch, she was very much a prima inter pares, the Bavarian State Orchestra’s principals to the fore from the first, prominent double bass solo onwards. The second movement’s canonic cadenza was played in its ossia version involving two solo violas, who duly got a round of applause at the end. The score’s suggestion of a vanished ideal world was well caught by Frang’s evocatively veiled sound, which grew into ringing vibrancy when appropriate. The stylised Ländler were idiomatically realised by the Munich musicians, who with Frang gave the concluding Bach chorale a cathartic quality. The orchestra, which this year celebrates its 500th anniversary, concluded the concert with an overwhelming performance of An Alpine Symphony. In a typically thoughtful gesture, Jurowski began the programme with the Third Symphony by Ukrainian composer Victoria Polevá, which mirrored Strauss’s work through its contemplation of nature in sound.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

Philadelphia

SPHINX VIRTUOSI

PERELMAN THEATRE 18 OCTOBER 2023

‘What’s the news?’ is the English translation of Habari Gani, a Swahili greeting typically exchanged during Kwanzaa. It is also the title of the new piece by cellist and composer Quenton Blache, which opened this gleaming evening with the Sphinx Virtuosi. Of course, Blache’s invigorating plunge was only part of the news: the fuller story is how quickly this elegant ensemble has ascended into the upper ranks of string orchestras.

An 18-member ensemble of Black and Latinx players (which I wrote about in the November 2023 issue), Sphinx is committed to music by those composers as well. Bassist Xavier Foley, one of the group’s principals, wrote Galaxy for himself and Kebra-Seyoun Charles as soloists, adding a Brazilian ganzá (like a maraca) to spice things up. Each musician deftly bounced off the other, amid Foley’s suave string textures.

Another work written for the ensemble, Abran Paso (2023) by Javier Farías from Chile, translated the composer’s guitar expertise to strings, with pungent and bristling results. And yet another premiere came from Spanish cellist Andrea Casarrubios, who created her stirring Herencia (‘Inheritance,’ 2023), inspired by ‘the trails that people leave behind them’, duly reinforcing her point by creating 18 individual instrumental parts.

In this context, two older works made welcome anchors of heritage. Adolphus Hailstork evokes cathedrals in his Sonata da chiesa (1992), and the ensemble responded with an appropriately glowing tone. And, to close the evening, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Generations (1996) offered warmth and vitality, in a work reflecting love for his family.

BRUCE HODGES

Ardent playing from Sphinx Virtuosi

SCOTT JACKSON

London

GABRIEL CROITORU (VIOLIN) HORIA MIHAIL (PIANO)

ROMANIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE 5 OCTOBER 2023

One of many such enlightened national institutes operating in the smarter districts of London, the RCI opened its annual season of concerts with a recital where the celebrity on show was the instrument rather than the musicians: the ‘del Gesù’ violin (c.1725) which belonged to George Enescu for half a century.

Enescu traded in a Stradivari to buy it, but after his death in 1955 the violin gathered dust in the composer’s home-turned-museum in Bucharest. In 2008 Gabriel Croitoru won a competition which gave him the right to play the instrument, and 15 years on he knows how to draw from it an uncanny, almost baritonal sweetness of tone.

The programme of miniatures, like the Belle Epoque salon of the RCI, was a throwback to Enescu’s own era. This was no place for 18th-century authenticity in Tartini’s ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata:

Croitoru lavished as much vibrato on it as he did Kreisler’s Sicilienne and Rigaudon. He spun a bewitching line in Enescu’s Ballade with the aid of a G-string sound that conjured up smoky campfires and caravans on the edge of a wood outside Cluj.

Dvořák’s Humoresque, Elgar’s Salut d’amour and Moszkowski’s Guitare all cast their brief spell of escapist nostalgia in turn, with Horia Mihail rolling chords on the piano like it was 1923 all over again. A Moldavian Dance by Dan Dediu (b.1967) supplied a fittingly anachronistic finale, in an idiom Enescu himself might have thought old hat.

PETER QUANTRILL

PHANTASM

WIGMORE HALL 11 OCTOBER 2023

William Byrd died in 1623, and quatercentenary celebrations have fallen largely to vocal ensembles, but the composer’s consort music is no less harmonically rich, contrapuntally intricate and deserving of attention beyond the ascetic confines of the recording studio. The slightest tremor of vibrato to the opening subject of the Fantasia a 6 (II) hinted at how far performance of this music has moved on even since the heyday of Fretwork in the 1990s.

Even if viol consorts still take as long to tune up between pieces as they do to play them – the intrinsic exigencies of instruments destined to be supplanted by more reliable replacements – the interpretations of Phantasm admit all the variety of style and articulation we expect from modern chamber ensembles in Haydn, while supported by the virtues of solid intonation and ensemble that were foreign to consort performances half a century ago. The gentle glow of Christe qui lux es filled the hall like summer-Evensong light. Bolder still was the idiomatic adoption of two movements from the Mass for Four Voices.

Varieties of style from Phantasm

MARCO BORGGREVE

The second half brought more ingenious transcriptions, this time of Bach. Without pressing hard on suspensions, Phantasm underlined the point at which the Ricercar a 3 from The Musical Offering goes off the rails. Adding parts one by one through chorale fantasias and fugues, Phantasm arrived at the summa of Baroque counterpoint which is the Ricercar a 6, here not weighted with anachronistic pathos but extrovert and tingling with the inner drama of its workings.

PETER QUANTRILL

MULLOVA ENSEMBLE: TRANSFIGURED NIGHT

MILTON COURT CONCERT HALL 18 OCTOBER 2023

With its themes of love and transcendence and its forest setting, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht is a work ripe for theatrical possibilities. Realising this, the Mullova Ensemble placed it at the end of a sequence of pieces exploring various aspects of it. The sequence ran in a seamless thread, linked by five darkly atmospheric electronic soundscapes composed by Jasmine Morris – one for each of the five stanzas of Richard Dehmel’s poem on which Schoenberg’s work is based. The most intriguing and innovative element was the dance of Ching-Ying Chien, for the large part lyrical, though occasionally oddly robotic, and sometimes interacting with the players (at one point Chien inserted herself within the crook of cellist Matthew Barley’s bow arm) before a projected backdrop of a moonlit wood. The most revealing of the satellite pieces were Debussy’s Clair de lune, Strauss’s song ‘Woodland Rapture’ (both in string arrangements) and the third movement of Janáček’s ‘Intimate Letters’ Quartet, whose strange lullaby quality resonated with the woman’s unborn child in the poem. Verklärte Nacht itself, however, was given without any dance element. If the playing throughout was committed, with Mullova and Barley joined by younger musicians of the ensemble, the performances, for better or worse, were rather subsumed within the multidisciplinary whole. This was a thoughtful project that had an enveloping quality, but it didn’t quite cohere overall.

EDWARD BHESANIA

Rising stars: soloists of the Kronberg Academy

WIGMORE HALL TRUST 2023

THÉOTIME LANGLOIS DE SWARTE (VIOLIN) JUSTIN TAYLOR (HARPSICHORD)

WIGMORE HALL 19 OCTOBER 2023

These two Baroque specialists have spent many hours exploring the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, picking out choice nuggets from 18th-century operas. There were numbers here from several operas by François Francoeur, including Les Augustales, Le trophée and Tarsis et Zélie. They may not appear at the Royal Opera House any time soon, but there was some beautiful music here, played with appropriate drama and eloquence, and a feeling that they knew what the opera was about, even if we didn’t.

The duo opened with three movements from Francoeur’s Sonata no.6 in G minor, bringing to the Adagio an easy flow and improvisatory-sounding phrasing; there was high energy and splendid articulation in the Courante and focused beauty in the Rondeau, played with passionate intensity. They produced torrid, high-velocity semiquaver drama in Les Augustales, and expressive arpeggiation in the Largo from Francoeur’s brother Louis’s B minor Sonata.

They then moved from France to England, and a hybrid sonata with movements from Henry Eccles’s G minor Sonata and Purcell’s Music for a while as a slow centre. There were subtleties of phrasing, dashing string crossing, double-stopping virtuosity and occasional rich, thrilling sound. Corelli’s La folia ended the programme in fine style, with de Swarte’s impeccable technique and musicality, and his close partnership with Justin Taylor, in full flow.

TIM HOMFRAY

SOLOISTS OF THE KRONBERG ACADEMY

WIGMORE HALL 22 OCTOBER 2023

This was a premiere-league school concert, with four string players already trailing prizes, all advanced students at the Kronberg Academy in Germany, accompanied by pianist Ita Navon. First on the platform was the Israeli violist Noga Shaham with Ödön Pártos’s Yizkor (In Memoriam), an emotionally wrenching work written in 1947. Shaham’s playing was tonally rich, plaintive and assertive, full of poignant nuance.

Next was violist Weronika Dziadek. Her performance of Clara Schumann’s Three Romances op.22 had understated authority. The D flat major piece was delicate and full of colour; the G minor Romance was capricious and fluent, and in the B flat major Romance – the best-known of the three – Dziadek was dynamically expressive and rose to moments of grandeur.

Violinist Dmytro Udovychenko had the lion’s share of the programme. His account of Robert Schumann’s Intermezzo from the ‘F–A–E’ Sonata was expressive and occasionally quixotic. Brahms’s Scherzo from the same sonata was brilliant and vigorous, with beautifully crafted contours. In Ysaÿe’s Solo Sonata in D minor op.27 no.3, the ‘Ballade’, he demonstrated serious technical chops, combining virtuoso showmanship and musicality, with a thrilling finish.

 Finally came violinist Hans Christian Aavik, a player with abundant personality, who performed Bartók’s Rhapsody no.1 with theatrical flair, technical brilliance and a big smile.

TIM HOMFRAY