Critic’s Notebook: Marin Alsop, the RSO and Bruce Liu in "Program vs. Performance"

F. Chopin, "Winner of the 2021 Chopin Competition", Bruce Liu (DG, 2022) US | UK | DE

S. Prokofiev, The Symphonies Marin Alsop, OSESP (Naxos, 6CDs, 2021) US | UK | DE

Insipid Program, Inspired Orchestra

Under Marin Alsop's baton the proof of the music is in the listening.

On paper, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra’s program under Marin Alsop on Friday, February 27th, at the Musikverein was a rather incoherent hodgepodge, especially compared to the orchestra’s concert a week earlier under Ingo Metzmacher: A bit of Friedrich Cerha, honoring his 100th birthday. A Chopin concerto to showcase the second-most recent Chopin Competition winner, Bruce Liu (not to be mistaken for the most recent winner, U.S.American Eric Lu). And Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, because, presumably, returning chief conductor Marin Alsop wanted to present the suite she’d (very effectively!) assembled herself.

But what looks uninspired and conventional doesn’t necessarily have to sound that way — and after the aforementioned Prokofiev, no one will have been asking anymore whether the concert might not have been put together more elegantly or freshly, so rousing was this second half. Right from the opening, the suite convinced with exaggerated loud-soft contrasts. Even more: the RSO played passionately and with visible motivation, edgy (in the best sense) and with tension. It hummed and buzzed at such a tempo that no ballet dancer could have kept up, but to the ears it positively glittered and glistened.

The Chopin E-minor Concerto couldn’t, alas, compete with that, even though Canadian Liu played it classically and sensitively, with a calm, even touch. Nothing was romanticized – and neither was there an air of ostentatious cool. It was a sort-of middle-of-the-road-excellence, very fine in the moment, forgotten soon thereafter. As an encore, Liu chose something modern, witty, Hungarian. You’d think György Kurtág, given his hundredth birthday. Wrong: It was György Ligeti instead; a case of “close enough” perhaps – though it might be said that the latter’s Fanfares: Etude no.4 is rather more substantial than most Kurtág pieces for piano – and includes welcome hints of Rzewski, apart from light abstraction. Neither (to the surprise of no one) could the scraping and lyrical creaking of Cerha’s late work Three Movements for Orchestra that opened the concert compete with the Prokofiev. But! Those who stayed in the Golden Hall after the lengthy applause could still experience a programmatic bracket of sorts: Cerha's Six Postludes, played on the organ by Wolfgang Koger which (despite a few escape attempts on the part of some remainders who got cold feet) turned out a surprisingly sizeable amount from the curious crowd and a surprisingly gratifying experience.

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Critic’s Notebook: When Alban Berg is the Sweetener: Great Programming with Metzmacher

K. Weill, Der neue Orpheus et al. Carole Farley, M.Guttman, J.Serebrier (ASV, 1997) US | UK | DE

A. Berg, Lulu Suite, 3 Pieces D.Gatti, Concertgebouw (RCO Live, SACD, 2008) US | UK | DE

A Successful 20th-Century Miscellany

Ingo Metzmacher and the RSO Vienna deliver a colorful evening in which Alban Berg formed the romantic high point

Good programming is an art. It should be interesting, ideally challenging too, somehow hang together... and alienate as few audience members as possible. At the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra, the audience-alienation factor plays a somewhat less important role. First, the orchestra a mandate to go exploring – and second, the audience is battle-hardened. Still, there’s always the temptation to jazz up "difficult" fare with a crowd-pleaser – to almost invariably unsatisfying results. Anyone who rushes to a concert for Tōru Takemitsu, or – as on Saturday evening, February 21st, at the Konzerthaus – for Friedrich Cerha or Kurt Weill, doesn’t want or need a Tchaikovsky piano concerto... and vice versa. Ingo Metzmacher has mastered the art of programming – which is why the evening's highlight was Alban Berg’s Lulu Suite.

A rather obvious bracket is Cerha and Lulu, since his orchestration of the third act established Cerha’s fame in the first place. Less obvious, however, is a cultural-historical factoid that might prove useful at the next pub quiz: Kurt Weill’s cantata Der neue Orpheus and Berg’s Lulu Suite were both brought into the world by Erich Kleiber. But before we got there, the other hundredth composer birthday of recent days was celebrated: Monumentum für Karl Prantl (1988) – in turn written by Cerha for Prantl’s 65th – rises up as a loud, brass-heavy cacophony that sweeps over you like a summer storm. There follows an orchestral whirring and swaying, Messiaen-esque meditations with grand string gestures and dabs of color from the organ. It has a certain sculptural quality but without the danger of therefore drifting towards populism or, for that matter, wider popularity.

Kurt Weill, in his cantata for soprano and violin written over 60 years earlier, isn’t really that either. You will certainly hear little from chameleon-composer Weill’s studies with Engelbert Humperdinck. But the soloists Alina Wunderlin and concertmaster Maighréad McCrann were able to distinguish themselves in this mixture of vaudeville, comedy, and "serious music." That just about proved irrelevant, though, because the Lulu Suite after intermission outshone everything. Once again Alina Wunderlin was allowed to step up, now in a glitter-black Lulu look, and she sang beguilingly agile, more intelligible than in the Weill, and with the right mixture of sensuality and edge, so that one didn’t think about tone rows but the protagonist’s fate instead. Metzmacher also drew remarkable things from the RSO: Whether the tavern atmosphere in the variations, the Tristan und Isolde-moments in the Adagio, or the death cry that bites into the Più lento like the nine-note chords in Mahler’s Tenth, everything was played with fervor and grand gesture.

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