Notes from the 2024 Salzburg Festival ( 2 ) Ouverture Spirituelle • Te Deum & Mozart Matinee

Te Deum — La Capella Reial • Le Concert des Nations • Savall

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Strahlende Trauermusik mit Jordi Savall und Adám Fischer

ALL PICTURES (DETAILS) COURTESY SALZBURG FESTIVAL, © Marco Borrelli. CLICK FOR THE WHOLE PICTURE.

Evening and Mourning: De Profundis for Wolfgang Rihm

No one knew Friday evening, when Jordi Savall performed Michel-Richard Delalande’s (and Arvo Pärt’s) De Profundis. And When Adám Fischer conducted Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music at the Saturday Mozart Matinee, news had just reached Salzburg that Wolfgang Rihm had died that night. In retrospect, those two concerts took on the character of a musical leave-taking from arguably the most respected living German composer and a dear human being.

Charpentier Te Deum Ensemble Les Surprises Alpha, 2024

The sun was just laying last bands of warm yellows across the battlements, church towers, and roofs of Salzburg when the sounds of early French baroque filled the Collegiate Church, courtesy of Le Concert des Nations and Jordi Savall, who made his way to stage with a crutch and his face that looks like an apostle carved from wood. The center of this Tootsie Pop, between Delalande and the timeless minimalism of Pärt, was Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s grand Te Deum, which Europeans of a certain age invariably associate with childhood moments in front of the TV, maybe for the Four Hills ski jumping tournament or the Eurovision Song Contest, seeing that the opening prelude is the signal of the “Eurovision” pan-European broadcasts. Only that that version is rather more stately than the tempestuous trumpets and snappy timpani were, that Savall & Co. hurled at the enthused audience – eliciting early Bravos after the “In te, Domine, speravi” faded away into the generous acoustic of the ideally suited (and carefully prepared) church space.

Throughout the evening, the young La Capella Reial de Catalunya choir radiated with musical joy, like a big family in a choral outing. The soloists from its own ranks pleased with fresh and clear interpretations – above all the positively glowing (it may partly have been the advanced state of pregnancy) soprano of Elionor Martínez. Mezzo Kristin Mulders added her incisive, blazing instrument into the mix, although the tight, pronounced vibrato did not quite gel with the other, purer voices.

The short encore, Pärt’s Da pacem Domine (written for Savall and inspired by the 2004 Madrid train bombings), opened like a Gregorian chorale before the typical Pärt-isms chimed in: The chords that drift apart, the shifting long vocal lines, the regular time signature of the timpani, all resting on a subtle, almost unnoticeable bed of gently buzzing strings.

Funereal and Rocking Mozart from A.Fischer

W.A.Mozart 45 Symphonies Danish National CO Dacapo, 2013

Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music, which Adám Fischer and the Mozarteum Orchestra performed, is not his best work – but it’s one of the more distinct ones in his output. The earthy, dark, woodwind-centered piece made for a most memorable curtain raiser, followed by a far less memorable D-minor Piano Concerto (K.466) in which the young Lukas Sternath, who won just about every prize at the 2022 ARD Music Competition, played flawless and lovely enough (“achingly sincere” is Tim Page’s suggestion for a put-down on such an occasion), but never achieved lift-off.

As if to prove that neither orchestra nor the conductor were to blame, Fischer and the Salzburgers went for a zany “Linz” Symphony that sparkled and crackled from start to end. With a smile across its collective face, the Mozarteum Orchestra delivered drive instead of legato, short but never choppy phrasing, and their joy transferred unto the audience’s – reminding us, why it is Adám Fischer, who currently has the best Mozart Symphony Cycle to his name.

Follow @ClassicalCritic




Photo descriptions:

Picture No.1: Te Deum – La Capella Reial · Le Concert des Nations · Savall 2024: Jordi Savall (Dirigent), Le Concert des Nations, Solisten

Picture No.2: Mozart-Matinee · A. Fischer 2024: Adam Fischer (Dirigent), Mozarteumorchester Salzburg

On ClassicsToday: The Bavarian Radio Choir's Ideal Entry to Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt: Live

Review by: Jens F. Laurson

Artistic Quality: ?

Sound Quality: ?

BR Klassik collected performances of its Bavarian Radio Chorus and the Munich Radio Orchestra (the little sister of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra) from between 2000 and 2011 and has turned them into an attractive sampler of the Estonian composer’s nouveau-sacred choral music, plus two instrumental works. We get Arvo Pärt the spiritual “tintinnabuli” minimalist in the grand, powerful Cecilia, vergine romana under Ulf Schirmer. We get Pärt the archaic post-Orffian in Litany under Marcello Viotti aided by the Hilliard Ensemble in good shape in 2000... [continue reading]

Ionarts-at-Large: The 2018 Pärnu Music Festival

Pärnu Music Festival

Paavo Järvi & EFO At Pärnu Music Festival 2018 – © IMZ Media

In sunny-summery Pärnu, on Estonia’s south western coast, it is possible to wade through the Baltic Sea one moment, and thirty minutes later sit in the concert hall with sand still between your toes, and enough time left to crane your neck to get a better look at Estonia’s Who’s-Who, all present among the audience assuming they aren’t conducting the concert in question. In this case, on August 8^th, at the Estonian Festival Orchestra’s concert under Paavo Järvi, those included Neeme Järvi, paterfamilias of the conducting clan, Arvo Pärt (at a sprightly 82 years still hopping – well, clambering – up the stage after his Third Symphony), and the splendid Erkki-Sven Tüür.[1] Also present: the slightly less well known Jüri Reinvere, whose And tired from Happiness… (“Und müde vom Glück”) received its premiere, and Tõnu Kõrvits, who was handed the Lepo Sumera Award for Composition before Järvi gave that night’s first upbeat at Pärnu Concert Hall.

Said hall has a pill-shaped layout, slightly raked orchestra seating and a balcony that goes 370° round all the way – except for a spot stage-right, where two immense 20-foot doors loom over the orchestra. Judging from a third back among the orchestra seats, it has a fine, accurate acoustic, not conducive to loud volumes and a little on the dry side. That proved a good environment to hear finely articulated strings and the clear woodwinds in Arvo Pärt’s Third Symphony, “his most popular to date, [which] makes a charismatic point of [the composer’s] then-newly won melodiously religious sentiment by quoting Gregorian chant amid all the other well-known Pärt contraptions”[2]. It also made the music appear as blocks of music (somewhere between Gabrieli and Bruckner), only reasonably seamlessly fused to form a gratifying whole. Strangely dampened, the Symphony ended up very much a low-octane affair for a concert opener.

The contrast was made more overt by Jüri Reinvere’s wham-bam And tired from Happiness… that opened the second half. The stage filled up to the brim with musicians, instigating the immediate thought: ‘Good luck getting that performed again!’ Then again, he may be onto something: Subsidized orchestra-musicians all over Europe need to work to satisfy the politicians that judge an orchestra’s success by how efficiently the total amount of players were used throughout the year. Never mind that this amounts to a penalty on performing Haydn and Mozart or anything else benefiting from a smaller ensemble – and skews the game in favor of the big romantics and beyond. If you have a harp and tuba and contra-bassoonist on your payroll, you have better use ‘em! Well, Jüri Reinvere does.

Pretty neatly, too: The faintly Wagner-ish “Schatten im Spiegel” movement glides and swells along pleasantly, fully harmonic (you’d scarcely expect anything else from an Estonian composer these days), with transitions that veered between Brucknerian and awkward. The long rising accumulative energy generated the thrill that the Pärt had denied. The mildly pretentious German movement titles can’t distract from that. The clusters are harmless. The string pizzicatos, accentuated by the [continue reading]

Read more »

Modern Program from NYCB

New York City Ballet, Company in Justin Peck’s The Most Incredible Thing (photo by Paul Kolnik)
Ballet has a long history of divertissements that have no dramatic coherence. The flimsiest of excuses can justify a series of pretty entrées, going all the way back to the foundation of the genre in French courtly dance. That is essentially what Justin Peck has created in his new choreography, The Most Incredible Thing, given its local premiere by the New York City Ballet on Tuesday evening at the Kennedy Center Opera House. It is an act-length ballet driven more by its quirky, colorful costumes than by dancing or story-telling.

Peck drew the story of The Most Incredible Thing from the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the same name (Det Utroligste). It concerns a contest for the hand of a princess, won by an inventor, whom Peck calls (somewhat ponderously) the Creator. His invention is a miraculous clock that produces twelve automated scenes, one for each of the hours, providing the excuse for the twelve colorful entrées that dominate the ballet. A menacing figure, the Destroyer, challenges the Creator's victory by laying waste to the clock and claiming the princess for himself. Not to worry, because the figures from the clock come back to life and save the day. Peck has softened some of the religious overtones of the clock figures, changing Moses at One o'Clock into a Cuckoo Bird, danced by the energetic Tiler Peck (no relation to the choreographer), with movements recalling the Firebird at times, and changing the Three Kings (Three o'Clock) from the Biblical Magi into sword-wielding warrior-kings.

Other Reviews: Sarah L. Kaufman, New York City Ballet injects incredible zing into new Peck ballet and other works (Washington Post, March 2) Joan Acocella, Stepping Up: The precocious rise of Justin Peck (The New Yorker, February 29) Alastair Macaulay, At New York City Ballet, Works That Tell Stories and Don’t (New York Times, February 22) ---, ‘The Most Incredible Thing’ Brings Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tale to Life (New York Times, February 3) Brian Seibert, Justin Peck Calmly Creates a Kingdom at City Ballet (New York Times, January 29)

Sadly, though, these entrées do not advance the story in any way, and they are effectively performed twice because the dancers all come back to life at the ballet's conclusion. In fact, one remembers neither the story nor the movements of the dancers, but the eclectic, brightly colored costumes (designed by Marcel Dzama, supervised by Marc Happel): the grey hoops of the Five Senses, the pointed hats of the Eight Monks, or the black-white spirals of the Nine Muses. Taylor Stanley was an earnest Creator, overshadowed by the skull-capped Destroyer of Andrew Veyette, who danced a tense pas de deux with the Princess of Sterling Hyltin. The pop-minimalist score by Bryce Dessner, guitarist of the indie rock band The National, is repetitive and, while it does not offend, it goes in one ear and out the other.

In the middle of the evening came Balanchine's classic choreography to Tchaikovsky's second piano concerto, rounding out the Balanchine-Tchaikovsky set from the company's 2013 visit. The cadenzas and solo moments played by soloist Susan Walters corresponded with beautiful solos and duets featuring the tall, lithe Teresa Reichlen. Her partner, Tyler Angle, had a charming scene in the slow movement with five women on either side, like fanned-out shadows, accompanied by a gorgeous duet of solo violin and cello.

The first act featured two short choreographies by Peter Martins, the company's Ballet Master-in-Chief. In The Infernal Machine, the movements of the dancers, Ashley Laracey and Amar Ramasar, on the darkened stage seemed to have little to do with the antic passage through countless sound worlds found in the score of the same name by Christopher Rouse. A snippet quoted from Beethoven's op. 130 string quartet flies by, half unnoticed near the piece's halfway point. Likewise in Ash, Michael Torke's often disjointed score inspired contrapuntal movements for the dancers, often separated only by a beat. It is a shame that we did not have the chance to hear the company's own orchestra, which conductor Andrew Litton now leads. His work here with the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra left some details to be desired.

The highlight was an excerpt of Christopher Wheeldon's After the Rain. The evening's best-matched couple, Tiler Peck and Jared Angle, took turns moving one another along, in a slow-moving, longing-drenched choreography that goes a long way to make Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel, a piece I find hard to tolerate in concert performance, a more complete work. Violinist Arturo Delmoni and pianist Nancy McDill provided the steady pulse of the music, with the section-ending "ping" notes corresponding to flicks of arms or feet on the stage.

This program repeats Friday evening, with a second program centered on Bournonville's La Sylphide presented in the rest of the run.

Tallis Scholars at the Kennedy Center

Tallis, Missa Puer Natus Est Nobis, Tallis Scholars, P. Phillips (Gimell, 1998)

Charles T. Downey, Tallis Scholars continue to set the standard
Washington Post, December 4

Listening to the recordings of the Tallis Scholars, one may wonder whether the group sounds that good live. The answer is yes, confirmed again during their latest visit to Washington on Thursday as part of the Fortas Chamber Music series at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. As they have done for more than 40 years, Peter Phillips and this British vocal ensemble continue to set the standard for the performance of Renaissance polyphony.

They do so in a way that’s not historically authentic, putting female voices on the upper parts, generally sung by boys in the Renaissance, and often transposing the music into keys suited to mixed voices... [Continue reading]

Tallis Scholars
Fortas Chamber Music Concerts
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

SEE ALSO:
James R. Oestreich, The Tallis Scholars, Hovering in a Meditative Sphere (New York Times, December 6, 2015)

Charles T. Downey, Tallis Scholars and Folger Consort Together Again (Ionarts, December 14, 2010)

---, Tallis Scholars Doing What They Do Best (Ionarts, November 30, 2010)

Minetti Quartett with Pastry

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

Beethoven, String Quartets (op. 18/4,2 and 95), Minetti Quartett (Hänssler Classic, 2014) Mendelssohn, String Quartets (op. 13, 12), Minetti Quartett (Hänssler Classic, 2012)

The Minetti Quartett, a young string quartet from Austria, was one of the highlights of our 2006 and 2007 review seasons. The discovery was thanks to the Embassy Series, the same organizer that brought them back to the area, after a long absence, for a concert on Friday night at the Austrian Embassy. (The group, on a North American tour, also appeared on Saturday afternoon in Baltimore.) The experience was not quite the same, however, since the quartet now features a new violist in Milan Milojicic, the principal violist of the Salzburg Chamber Soloists and the Deutsche Kammerakademie, who replaced Markus Huber in 2011. Furthermore, a family matter prevented first violinist Maria Ehmer from taking part in the tour, so she is being replaced by Božena Angelova.

They opened with one of the quartets from their new Beethoven disc, op. 18/2, unified and crisply articulated, with a pleasing control of sound, aside from some unpleasant growls from the viola. A playful coda to the first movement led to a glowing slow movement, with gently pulled rubato and minimized vibrato. Much of the work rests on the sound of the first violin, which challenged Angelova at times, but the third movement was light and fun, pitched just right in character, although the fourth movement was a bit too fast for comfort. It was paired with Arvo Pärt's Fratres, in its original formulation for string quartet from 1977, which was played just as it should be: the harmonic-infused chords glistened, lush sounds that gently shifted, like a kaleidoscope, around the unchanging drone in the second violin. At one point, a plane flying low lent its rumbling boom to the sound, fitting right in. The piece, from the first phases of the Estonian composer's experimentation with the tintinnabular form of what has since come to be called "holy minimalism," sounds as fresh as it must have toward the end of the Age of Aquarius, a cliche that had not yet become a cliche because of endless decades of self-recapitulation.

The program ended with a Mendelssohn quartet, op. 44/2, not one of the pieces on the group's Mendelssohn disc from a couple years ago. With the fast tempos taken as quickly as possible, this was impassioned playing that still never felt forced. The agitated stuff had its expected effect -- the repeated notes of the scherzo theme just buzzed -- but it was the smooth legato of the first movement's second theme, for example, that swayed me, as did the viola lament of the second movement's trio section. The third movement did not drag, in a gentle lilt, with some fine cello solos and a quiet end that showcased the silence, which the audience, after clapping after almost every movement, finally allowed between movements. The virtue of that silence was apparent as the group was able to bite into that empty space with a finale that was not just sawed away at, but given much careful gradation and shaping. The group rode the piece thrillingly to its end, in a way not steely or desperate, just intense. Patisserial delights awaited after musical ones, with slices of warm Wiener Apfelstrudel and other goodies laid out in the reception room.

"Vieuxtemps" Guarneri del Gesù Sings Again

Charles T. Downey, Anne Akiko Meyers takes Vieuxtemps violin to National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington Post, March 29)

Air: The Bach Album, A. A. Meyers, English Chamber Orchestra, S. Mercurio (Bach's double violin concerto, with Meyers on both parts, playing her 1697 "ex-Molitor" and 1730 "Royal Spanish" Stradivari violins)

One of the most sought-after figures in classical music was heard in a concert at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on Wednesday night. The 1741 Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Gesu, a fabled violin valued at $18 million when it was up for sale in 2010, has staged a comeback, offering a demure program of mostly light music that showed off its mellifluous tone. After changing hands this year for an undisclosed sum paid by an anonymous benefactor, the instrument brought along its current player, American violinist Anne Akiko Meyers — who owns two other expensive Stradivarius violins — for the ride.

The Vieuxtemps has a striking sweetness of sound, capable of subtle beginnings and endings, heard in the simple and repetitive “Spiegel im Spiegel” by Arvo Part. Meyers drew out the instrument’s vocal side in Mozart’s K. 377 Violin Sonata, especially the winsome theme and variations, even while leaving out the repeats. [Continue reading]

Anne Akiko Meyers (violin) and Wendy Chen (piano)
1741 "Vieuxtemps" Guarneri del Gesù
Music by Mozart, Pärt, Ravel, Piazzolla, Falla
National Museum of Women in the Arts

The Shtick, Shpil, and Spheres of Daniel Hope

Daniel Grossmann has been leading and shaping Munich’s little, innovatively programming Jakobsplatz Orchestra since its inception in 2005. Recently he hit upon the good (indeed highly necessary and long overdue) idea to also let other conductors lead the band: It ought to be good for the band, their experience and morale, and also mitigate their reputation as a toy orchestra for Grossmann (à la Mendelssohn, who got a chamber orchestra for his 12^th birthday).

Grossmann could hardly have landed a more impressive coup than getting Daniel Hope as the orchestra’s first ever guest conductor. Hope (who looks a bit how Louis C.K. might, with a violin and minus the funny) is on the front end of a promo-tour of his albums “Spheres” and “Four Seasons Re-Composed” (see Best Recordings of 2012) and needed a backup band for his project anyway… and the Jewish community center’s Jakobsplatz Orchestra was a ready, willing, and an appropriate fit for Hope, who likes to engage in a bit of ambiguous jewishy shpil & shtick. (Always reminds me of “The Yada Yada” Seinfeld episode: “…and this offends you as a Jewish person? / No, it offends me as a comedian.”)

All kinds of composers, Spheres, D.Hope et al. DG M.Richter, Recomp. / 4 Seasons D.Hope / de Ridder / KCO DG

There he was, Monday the 18^th, going down his set list of songs, doing a chat’n’play along the way, in nearly perfect German. Right off the bat Johann Paul von Westhoff’s Imitazione delle Campane, which lends itself to anywhere and anytime, in any kind of arrangement… and it really does sound timeless. Or rather it seems to be foreshadowing (if there was such a thing) 20^th century retro-minimalism (if there is such a thing). What followed was the (in-concert) world premiere of Gabriel Prokofiev’s Spheres, modern minimalist tic-toc that already set the mood for the Recomposed Four Seasons later on. Then Philip Glass’ Echorus, which is the good man at his Glassian best and better yet: a piece originally written for Menuhin which allows Daniel Hope one of his “did you know I studied with Menuhin?!” plugs. No... really? Tell us more. Trysting Fields is Michael Nyman taking Mozart (specifically the Sinfonia Concertante) apart and reassembling it (not for the first time). It’s fun; more fun still is the Peter Greenaway movie in which it originally found use. An excerpt from Karsten Gundermann’s Faust II Reloaded was the epitome of excited violin trapeze-work above a carpet of calmly moving strings. Arvo Pärt’s evergreen Fratres (not a particularly clean performance, alas, with poor pizzicatos but impressive right-on-the-money flageolet notes) capped a first half full of very different pieces, all of which sounded the bloody same.

If Grossmann was nervous before the show about his orchestra’s performance, he need not have been. They did very well, including the co-soloists when they were asked upon. Then again, very little was asked of them in the repertoire—which relegated the orchestra to a slightly wasteful backup role not unlike using a great choir only to go “ah-umm” on two notes, alongside a starlet singer.

The ‘Max Richter-goes-Four Seasons’ album is great, if you give it half a chance. Much greater, incidentally, on record (with amplification and athmospherinization [sic]), than it comes across live. The swoosh of turning pages (not Hope, who uses a very fancy page-self-turning Kindle-like gizmo) is an element of reality that this seductive re-Vision of the Four Seasons does not need. What it needs is a car stereo and a long, late-night drive on the highway. Hope encored a bit from Summer and then, true to form (and place) his encore-staple, the Kaddish by Ravel. Yadda Yadda… a fun night, quibbles and all.