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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Dip Your Ears: No. 282 (Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Indelibly Interesting Symphonies)

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

Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Fifth for Orchestra, Big Band and Electric Guitar

Erkki-Sven Tüür’s ongoing cycle of interesting symphonies (in 2017 he arrived at No. 9) makes him – by quality more significantly than quantity – the premiere symphonist of our time. Always good for the inclusion of seemingly eclectic instruments (electric guitar, accordion, big band, percussion, tape, synthesizer) in his orchestral works, he expands the tonal palate much the same way a Gustav Mahler did when the latter threw the mandolin or guitar or castanets or xylophones or a hammer into his symphonies, all before perfectly unsuspecting audiences. (Happily, this is much easier on the ears than when other composers stick with the traditional instrumental apparatus only to then make these instruments generate every sound except those they were meant to produce in the first place.)

In this Fifth Symphony, premiered in 2005 at the Stuttgart Eclat New Music Festival, the electric guitar has some particularly lyrical quasi-cadenzas in the second movement. The fact that we might find it curious is only a consequence of our aural associations and expectations with and of an electric guitar. But all the rest of the symphony is pretty classical, down to the four-movements and their structure, which goes to show that there’s still much left in the old form and ‘old’ – i.e. tonal – modes, if only a composer can muster sufficient imagination.

Erkki-Sven Tüür does. In fact, his works are bursting with originality and phantasy, freed of all academicism and perceived “ought-to’s”. Not all of them as successful as this Fifth (or the Seventh) Symphony, perhaps, but always full throttle and never displaying originality for its own sake. The groove of the third movement is befitting any classical Scherzo; the Big band gets its moment in the spotlight, backed by a percussive, happy but firmly embedded, organic beat (sound clip) – not as artificially superimposed and faddish as large percussion sections can sound in too many contemporary works (Higdon, Sierra, Widmann, Golijov et al.).

It’s possible that connoisseurs of conventional symphonies wrinkle their brow in disapproval of these allegedly foreign ingredients. This brings to mind a beverage-related spoonerism of composer and linguistic genius Franz Mittler: “I would rather have a boot in my rear / Than a root in my beer.” But Tüür’s symphonies are not symphonies-in-name only, they are decidedly real beer; just a modern variant of the classic original. Maybe something Dogfish Head Brewery would concoct.

Rounding out a fabulous disc is the accordion concerto Prophecy, a substantial concerto in four continuous movements, which often ends up a swarm of sound with intermittent, hallmark Tüür moments (dry timpani before a canvas of dark quiet, for example). In it, the accordion is less folksy than it is grave; the whole thing more redolent of an organ concerto than a polka. As a card-carrying accordion-lover, I dig it muchly.

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This review had been previously published on Classics Today.

Notes from the 2025 Salzburg Festival ( 5 ) Cuarteto Casals in Shostakovich

Salzburg Festival • Chamber Music • Cuarteto Casals

Also published in Die Presse: Serenade zum Todestag von Schostakowitsch: Cuarteto Casals in Salzburg

D.Shostakovich, The String Quartets (v.1), Cuarteto Casals Harmonia Mundi D.Shostakovich, The String Quartets (v.2), Cuarteto Casals Harmonia Mundi D.Shostakovich, The String Quartets (v.3), Cuarteto Casals Harmonia Mundi

Death Becomes them: Shostakovich Quartets in Salzburg

The Cuarteto Casals scored with dark sonority rather than hard edges in their DSCH-dedicated chamber music recital

Monday evening at the Salzburg Festival brought another birthday serenade for Shostakovich’s 50^th death anniversary at the Mozarteum Hall – from the Cuarteto Casals. They promised three string quartets. Only three? After all, the Mandelring Quartet (CD reviews here, here, and here) still played all 15 quartets at the Festival back in 2011! (Reviewed on ionarts here.) But one doesn't want to be immoderate, and with Quartets 1, 8, and 15 – i.e. the first, last, and most famous – the selection was promising enough.

All the more so since there are no “early” string quartets with DSCH: When the 32-year-old Shostakovich took his first crack at the genre, with op.49, he was already an experienced composer with one suppressed and four performed symphonies plus two operas under his belt. The Lady Macbeth scandal that had brought him to the edge of the Gulag, and the ‘resurrection’ thanks to the Fifth Symphony, lay behind him. It should not surprise, then, that this first quartet is immediately a masterwork – as if it had sprung, Pallas-Athena-like, from Zeus’s head.

Right away, the Cuarteto Casals’ gloriously solid, perpetually beautiful, expressive sound – from top to bottom, first violin to cello – makes quite an impression. Cellist Arnau Tomàs (check out his Bach!!!) handled his part with resonant, bearish authority. Wonderful, the woody, round-cheeked timbre of Cristina Cordero’s viola. Fascinating the mediating work of second violinist Abel Tomàs. And fitting excellently into the picture: the dark-timbred first violin of Vera Martínez Mehner. One doesn’t miss the rougher approach that has a long tradition in these works at all, because the Spanish quartet’s lyricism, while luxurious, never seems superficial. Nor did it ever feel like the quartet was rounding the edges too much – a criticism that might be (though it doesn’t have to be) made of the Mandelrings. Small and infrequent intonation wobbles couldn’t distract amidst the astonishment over the sound.

That the Eighth Quartet is so much better known than the others does, in a way, surprise, since they all seem equally good. Or more evenly superb than the symphonies, anyway. On the other hand, it doesn’t take much to make the difference between hit and rarity, icon and footnote. (Are, for example, Mozart’s symphonies really as much better than those of Vanhal and Mysliveček as the fame gradient would have us believe?) But perhaps it’s also the dark vein of op.110 – so fitting the clichéd image of DSCH – that fascinates us, seeing that it appears to reflect the composer’s suffering and disguised resistance in Soviet terror…

And it was melancholy-gripping, what the Cuarteto Casals – currently recording all the quartets for Harmonia Mundi (see the Shostakovich String Quartet Survey) – delivered. “If his 15 symphonies are, according to the composer, ‘gravestones’”, writes Robert Reilly in Surprised by Beauty, “then the quartets are the flowers he lays on the graves.” The Cuarteto Casals’ tone – sadly beautiful and mellow – suits this poetry of suffering well.

One could title the six slow, relentless, embittered movements of op.144 with: “The Six Last Words of the Survivor”. Even more so than with Haydn, this deceleration on Shostakovich’s part is a gutsy, deliberate, and pointed imposition on the listener. The interpreters’ long lines made concentration easy, though, thanks to the unremitting inner tension amid this sustained slowness, and the pinch of Haydnesque mischief. The encore from the Third String Quartet, meanwhile, was merciless and had a symphonic earthiness about it. Fabulous, all, and very promising as far as their recordings are concerned.

Vera Martínez Mehner (Violine), Abel Tomàs (Violine), Arnau Tomàs (Violoncello), Cristina Cordero (Viola). SF / Marco Borrelli

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Critic’s Notebook: Keenlyside Rejuvenated - A Relative Winterreise Success