Post-Pärnu listening

You'd think I might want a break from music after six glorious nights of it in Estonia. Not a whit; to return to the Pärnu Music Festival was to fall in love with a group of superlative musicians all over again, and to get to chat to some lovely folk I haven't spoken to there before. While I await the continuation of the party at the Prom tonight, I've been listening around the experience during a relatively lazy day at home.

A perfect morning palate-cleanser was the CD utterly delightful Japanese viola player Mari Adachi gave me, called Winterreise because at its heart are transcriptions of nine songs from Schubert's cycle. Some work better than others in their wordless context; better to hear the naturally introspective voice of the viola in such subtle hands, beautifully partnered by pianist Ryoko Fukasawa, than a singer who doesn't inscape properly. Best of all, for me, was to hear Mari soar in Schumann's Andante and Allegro, and there are some very original touches in the Schubert 'Arpeggione' Sonata. I won't forget her exquisite Pärnu performance, poised halfway between stage and organ, of Tõnu Kõrvits' Wanderer's Song.

This is also a good excuse to use a few more specimens from Kaupo Kikkas's comprehensive Pärnu photo-gallery - it won't be the last time - so here's the admirable Kõrvits last Wednesday, receiving the Lepo Sumera Prize awarded annually to a composer who has made an outstanding contribution to Estonian music.

Of all the orchestral performances, it's Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra as curtain-raiser (!!) to the second EFO concert which has stayed with me, so I put on one of Christoph von Dohnányi's better Cleveland recordings, razor-sharp. 

What a total masterpiece this is, in shape as well as colour and idea. Is it heretical to wish that Lutosławski had written more in the same vein - did finding his own voice entail a certain arcane quality I don't always 'get' or warm to? On which note, Paavo told me the other night that Boulez came backstage after a performance he (PJ) had conducted of the Concerto for Orchestra. He'd never heard it before, though he knew WL's later works very well.

Finally, a proper listen at last to the earlier, composition-wise, of the two Arvo Pärt discs Paavo brought out with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra in the early 2000s, for which I wrote the liner notes. That battle towards the essence reached after a five-year silence was so hard-won. I now find most affecting the early children's cantata My Garden - almost a parody of Young Pioneering, certainly ambiguous; the end of the Second Symphony too. 

I'll be lucky to hear the Third tonight for the third time in five days (I was also lucky to be at the rehearsal where Pärt played an active part in the process, pictured above). It's a work I've known to some degree since Järvi senior's 1989 Prom performance, and I'll be listening, hopefully, with even greater awareness.

14/8 update: the Prom, which Pärt attended to the audience's huge delight and surprise (photos by Chris Christodoulou), was mostly a spectacular success. My Arts Desk colleague Boyd Tonkin is reviewing it, so we'll see what he thinks*. Paavo and the orchestra mastered the tricky acoustics of Albert's colosseum, from where I was sitting, at any rate, in a box with the Estonian Ambassador; textures had maximum clarity, phrases high definition, and the pianissimos were magical - PJ seemed to have taken heed of Barenboim's maxim that in this hall, you draw the listener in rather than push out. The Pärt symphony, now with a halo around the sound, moved me more than ever, and the Sibelius had more space than in Pärnu. 

The liability was the gifted but oddly narcissistic Khatia Buniatishvili. While Leonskaja found fresh depths in every line of the Grieg Concerto in Pärnu, making it sound like a new work, Buniatishvili was self-regardingly soft-loud, slow-fast. Murderously fast in the finale, which ceased to be a dance. I heard that she'd adopted a completely different tempo in the rehearsal. And it was disconcerting to see her descend from a high trill with the right hand and flick her hair out of her eyes with the left.

Our genius clarinettist Matt Hunt's phrasing in the Sumera encore, playing with the space but always joining the notes with supreme musicianship, was everything Buniatishvili's insane encore - Debussy's Clair de Lune - was not. Heck, the moon could have done an entire revolution around the earth in the time that took.

*Second update: he loved it, and writes so eloquently. 

Trio for the end of plenty

In a week where we all found out how much we're going to suffer from the cuts - the poor more than the rich, as usual*, the arts, adult education - we had three distinguished visitors from the BBC Symphony Orchestra to the course at the City Literary Institute, hotfoot from the meeting in which they'd learned how they might be affected.

How we adored violinist Anna Smith, viola-player Kate Read and Michael Atkinson, cellist of the suspended-due-to-pressures-of-child-rearing Merchant Quartet (one of four from the orchestra which had already been to play to us). I hasten to add, by the way, that I took the above not great photo while they were warming up, not during their performance. Might not this be the best possible advertisement for these non-vocational, purely appreciative courses which could be the first to fall under the axe - despite the fact that, filling up as we do on the first day of booking, we more than pay our way?

Which they won't if hard-campaigning City Lit Principal Peter Davies has anything to do with it. And we've been through worse with a previous Tory government which threatened to close us down altogether. I'm still not clear on what future, and what cut-percentage, adult education faces, as it's low down the list on the reporting. Watch this space**.

In the meantime, the BBCSO trio - believe it or not, the second group of its kind that's come to the course in less than a year - played us a work I'd never heard, Dohnanyi's Serenade.


Like Korngold, young Erno was a prodigy who kept on ploughing the same late-romantic furrow, and rarely sounded the native woodnotes like fellow countryment Bartok and Kodaly. Yet within those bounds the Hungarian can surprise. The Serenade of 1902 starts in orthodox if piquant fashion, bringing the viola to the fore in the lovely second movement. But the scherzo and finale run chromatically wild, and the heart of the work is the Theme and Variations, ending ethereally as the viola floats between violin weavings and cello pizzicati. We loved that movement so much that I cajoled the trio into playing it again at the end.


In between, we asked the usual probing questions, and found out that Anna and Mike were in two different minds about the Roxburgh premiere the other week (Kate had taken the week off, which may have been as well as it was one of the hardest the other two had ever experienced). Good to hear a detailed defence of certain aspects of it from Mike, when all we've had so far are invective and abuse on the Arts Desk site. He added that they'd found the Elgar Falstaff, which has been out of their rep for some years, much harder to play.

All three enthused about the winner of the Besancon Conducting Competition they'd been the resident orchestra for: not since Bychkov at the 2009 Proms had a conductor so amazed them, along with judges and audience, as Japanese newcomer Kazuki Yamada. You heard the name here first, and don't miss his first concert with the BBCSO on 4 March 2011. Here, sure enough, is the performance they especially raved about - the first movement of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique at Besancon (UPDATE: removed from YouTube by spoilsport Yamada).

Talking of astonishing young 'uns, BBC New Generation Artist Khatia Buniatishvili, a 23 year old Georgian pianist and protegee of Martha Argerich, will be playing the Chopin Second Piano Concerto at one of the orchestra's Maida Vale concerts (as well as a Wigmore lunchtime on 1 November which I'll have to miss).


She stunned some of us, and infuriated others, at Stephen Kovacevich's 70th birthday concert on Sunday evening. True, the Liszt sonata was tumultuous and very fast - a criticism of Buniatishvili's playing generally, I've noticed - in the demonic torrents. But she makes such a full, rich sound and shows such painful sensitivity in the few moments of redemption that I was won over with tears in my eyes - and a pain in the gut from the way she seemed to be punching it, not unpleasurably (masochistic me). And I was right at the back of the hall...well, these are exciting times, and Buniatishvili is going to be around for many years to come. Here's another YouTube clip from the BBC, of Khatia playing the finale of Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata:



Finally, there's something to celebrate tomorrow when the BBC Symphony Orchestra marks its 80th birthday with a megaconcert including two new or newish works (by Saariaho and Stephen McNeff. Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture, which launches the programme, was the first work in the BBCSO's inaugural concert under Adrian Boult on 22 October 1930; early the next year Stravinsky came to play and Ansermet conducted the orchestra in his Rite of Spring, ending tomorrow's proceedings.

Fascinating to read, in Nicholas Kenyon's hopefully to-be-updated history of the orchestra, of wartime musical policy. In 1941 its credo was headed, albeit somewhat pompously, by 'Creative Principle: Music is an ennobling spiritual force, which should influence the life of every listener'. A message that needs to be reinforced, perhaps differently worded, today. Here's a bit of elegiac respite after all that hectic music: Elgar's sad little Sospiri, Boult conducting the BBCSO in Bedford during the war (UPDATE: also removed, who knows why, as it's out of copyright).

*compelling piece here by Johann Hari in today's Independent. If you haven't the patience to read it all, how's this for clarity: 'There is one stark symbol of how unjust the response to this economic disaster caused by bankers is. They have just paid themselves £7bn in bonuses – much of it our money – to reward themselves for failure. That's the same sum Osborne took from the benefits of the British poor yesterday, who did nothing to cause this crash. And he has the chutzpah to brag about "fairness." '

**Second footnote courtesy of Peter Davies: 'we will not know the actual implications for us until 21 Nov, when the Department issue the "grant letter" spelling out their exact priorities and funding for next year.'