Critic’s Notebook: RSO & Poschner - The Harmonists Strike Back

Also published in Die Presse: Poschners Gebet für die Seejungfrau: Das RSO im Musikverein

E-S.Tüür, Piano Concerto, Sy.#7, P.Järvi / Frankfurt RSO, NDR Chorus / L.Mikkola ECM

Erkki-Sven Tüür Symphony No.5, Prophecy (Accordion Concerto) Nguyên Lê, Mika Väyrynen Olari Elts, Helsinki PO (Ondine, 2007) US | UK | DE

Moussa and Tüür, Wagner & Strauss: An ear-friendly Vienna RSO Concert of the New and the Old

Ear-friendly modernism and Romantic staples with the RSO under Poschner

Having a premiere is easy; getting three performances in four years (in Vienna alone) is decidedly not. Yet that’s the trick Samy Moussa pulled off with Elysium, now played by the RSO in the Konzerthaus under Markus Poschner after being premiered by the Montréal Symphony Orchestra in ’22 and included on a program of the Vienna Philharmonic under Thielemann last year. From its first catchy chords—with glissandi floating back and forth so thickly, they acted like opulent portamenti—Moussa’s work wants to please. Not a lot actually happens within the dense sonic surface, but that hardly matters—no more than the fact that one often feels reminded of very good film music.

More substance is found in the more demanding Lux Stellarum by Erkki-Sven Tüür, one of the most interesting composers of the last several decades: a genuinely individual voice, ideology-free and fully his own. The flute concerto crackles and rattles; its solo part, played by dedicatee Emmanuel Pahud, shifts between acrobatic whistling and lyrical introspection. Here, too, sound-plates slide over one another, but of a smaller, more varied sort—broken up by rhythms that, time and again, provide little jolts of surprise.

Tüür the symphonist (he’s written ten so far; Nos. Five and Seven are essential listening) never panders. The modernity of his music is never concealed or coyly muffled, yet it remains consistently consonant. That this aspect, in this 14th of now 16 RSO-commission concerts, falls largely to the orchestra may be due to the solo instrument: it doesn’t wander far from the conventional contemporary flute vocabulary, even though Tüür is himself a flutist. (Checking it out for yourself will be possible soon enough: together with his newest concerto, the Oboe Concerto, Lux Stellarum will be released before long with the Tonhalle-Orchester under Paavo Järvi on Alpha.) Both works do the RSO’s mission proud and reflect the orchestra’s heartening tendency not to cede the terrain of ear-friendly modernism to the ivory-tower avant-garde. For that, Poschner is just the right man—there’s so much beautiful music to un- and rediscover that other orchestras rarely, if ever, touch. (Is it too much to hope now, for an RSO Hartmann-Symphony Cycle and a Karl Höller Focus?)

The more conventional second half offered Wagner’s Parsifal Prelude and Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration. The Wagner—apparently the fourth-place finisher when it came to rehearsal time but not much more often played by this orchestra than either new piece —was, despite largely lovely string sound, not quite as polished as aimed-for. But in the seamlessly ensuing Strauss everything snapped back into place. The way early Strauss rises from stillness and quiet into a gloriously Straussian racket, only to come to rest in nostalgic sweetness, was wonderfully shaped and admirably delivered by the orchestra—both as a collective and in its individual contributions.


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