Critic’s Notebook: Heavenly Secular Cantatas from the Vienna Academy Orchestra, Martin Haselböck, and The Supremes

Also published in Die Presse: Musikverein: So himmlisch tönen weltliche Kantaten

Johann Sebastian Bach Cantata BWV 214 "Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten!" et al Sampson, Danz, Padmore, Kooy P.Herreweghe / Collegium Vocale Gent (Harmonia Mundi, 2005) US | UK | DE

Johann Sebastian Bach Cantata BWV 134a "Die Zeit, die Tag und Jahre macht" et al Danz, Ullmann H.Rilling, Gächinger Kantorei, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart (Hänssler Classic, 2000) US | UK | DE

Johann Sebastian Bach Cantata BWV 206 "Schleicht, Spielende Wellen, Und Murmelt Gelinde" et al Larsson, von Magnus, Prégardien, Mertens T.Koopman / Amsterdam BO&C (Erato/Challenge, 1997, 2004) US | UK | DE

Celebratory Bach to Die For

A slice of Bach-heaven on earth, courtesy of the Orchester Wiener Akademie and their soul-stirred singers.

The Orchester Wiener Akademie is a bit like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes you bite into a bit of a turd. But on Sunday morning in the Musikverein, the hand that reached in pulled out a truffle of the highest order – everything that makes the OWA glorious when it’s in top form. It began with the program. The sounds that filled the Golden Hall were, at first, familiar: the Christmas Oratorio. Fair enough for the first Sunday of Advent, especially in a world that can’t seem to tell Advent and Christmas apart anymore.

But – thankfully – it wasn’t the Oratorio. It was the secular cantata BWV 214, Tönet ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten! – the birthday serenade for Maria Josepha, whose best bits Bach later upcycled into his Christmas cycle. (“Upcycling” is exactly what we’d call that common Baroque practice today – all the more since Bach only ever parodied from worldly works upwards to sacred ones, never the other way round.) Alongside came Die Zeit, die Tag und Jahre Macht, BWV 134a, and another grand secular cantata, Schleicht, spielende Wellen, BWV 206 – in which four rivers, the Danube included, butter up Elector Friedrich August II. (Its cheerful relief that the Vistula is no longer clogged with body parts offers a vivid glimpse into 17th-century daily reality.)

Magnificent works all, and in magnificent scoring. And what a band! Beyond the aforementioned brilliantly buoyant natural trumpets, the melting flute trio, the ever-superb solo oboe, the cello, and strings playing with real intent, there was an eight-singer team (doubling as chorus) that made the heart leap. To single out individuals feels downright caddish – and yet: the round-toned tenderness Stefan Zenkl that showed ; the way Daniel Johannsen (who can breathe life into any text to make the soul smile) and Reginald Mobley (even with a smaller but lively voice) let the duet “Es streiten, es siegen” flow and dance; how Miriam Feuersinger sang her Bellona with intimate intensity – it was delight, pure and simple.

And so the music streamed along joyfully, steered with blissful sureness by Martin Haselböck, fully in his element.

Photocredit: Amar Mehmedinovic

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Critic’s Notebook: The Vienna Symphony in Mozart and Haydn’s Nelson-Mass w/Andrea Marcon

Also published in Die Presse: Mozart im Musikverein: Wo warst du, Ádám?

Wolfgang A. Mozart Symphony Nos. 32, 38, 40, Josef Krips / Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Philips, 2007) US | UK | DE

Joseph Haydn Nelson Mass John Eliot Gardiner / Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Orchestra (Archiv, 2000) US | UK | DE

Where Were You, Ádám?

A fine evening of great Viennese Classicism from the Vienna Symphony — but a lingering “what if?”

As long as the unmistakable sounds of Mozart’s “Great” G-minor Symphony still stir childhood memories in us, concert halls will never run empty. Whether that is an optimistic or pessimistic outlook is another matter. In any case, the Golden Hall was respectably full on Saturday night when the Vienna Symphony let this work unfold. A wistfully radiant mood emanated from the penultimate of Wolfgang Amadé’s symphonies — a piece that seems like the very quintessence of the Mozartian spirit. The orchestra supplied a good portion of that, playing the first movement with lively, if not exactly “light” but buoyantly supple, verve. On the podium, replacing the indisposed Ádám Fischer, stood Andrea Marcon, who managed to retain some of that spring in the third and fourth movements’ step as well.

At this point, Fischer — who has a great rapport with the orchestra — was not yet sorely missed. But in the ensuing “Nelson Mass” by Haydn, he decidedly was. The Wiener Singverein was not to blame; they sang with heart and commitment. The solo quartet, on the other hand, though each contributed something solid individually, never really blended. Peter Mauro: solid and unobtrusive, which is not the worst you could say about a tenor. Mezzo Yajie Zhang: milky, with generous vibrato, but somewhat vague and indistinct. Florian Bösch: dark-hued, clear, impeccable. And then Katharina Konradi, who in her opening notes sounded like a car alarm going off — piercing, sharp, impossible to ignore — but had found her voice by the Gloria, singing expressively, if several decibels above the rest, as befits a Bayreuth Woglinde.

The Rieger organ sounded like something out of the Addams Family, and the orchestra — ultimately a touch unfocused in the Agnus Dei — seemed to reduce itself to accompaniment. Thank goodness the music is magnificent.


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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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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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