Mirga and DG: a contract to get excited about

OK, so when Andris Nelsons signed up to Deutsche Grammophon, fine, wise choice on the company's part, but did the world need more recordings of Bruckner and Shostakovich symphonies (good as they are)? When his Lithuanian neighbour to the south of Latvia Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (pictured above in what seems to be a nice new image by Andreas Hechenberger) brokered her deal, news of which has been released today, she clearly had take-it-or-leave it ideas about the repertoire she wanted to record.

Repertoire which will actually enrich us rather than just give another 'conductor's interpretation of...' (though I'd have been very happy if they'd gone for her individual and loving way with the Tchaikovsky ballets). The first release in May will be of Weinberg's Symphony No. 21, which the composer tentatively suggested might be called 'Kaddish', with the combined forces of the CBSO, Kremerata Baltica and its presiding genius Gidon Kremer - I raved about the live performance, coupled with Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony, here on The Arts Desk - and his Second Symphony (Kremerata Baltica only). Next are works by Mirga's fellow Lithuanian Raminta Šerkšnytė with the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra , Vilnius Municipal Choir and Kremerata Baltica. DG haven't specified what 'works by British composers' will be on the cards in the third project, to celebrate the orchestra's centenary.

It was serendipitous news on a day when I was working on a note for the performance she'll be giving with the CBSO of The Sea by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911), her country's greatest composer. I'd expected to find this half-hour symphonic poem a bit wispy and second-rank, but it's astonishingly good. Listening to two recordings (by Svetlanov, right up his late romantic street, and  Gintaras Rinkevičius with the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra he founded in 1989 - I presume that's the same as the 'National' SO cited above), it's obvious how the young composer had absorbed the sound-worlds of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben. Yet he eventually makes something of his own in the hypnotic nocturne that follows the storm. 

Not sure what to make of the art which took over in the final years of Čiurlionis's all-too-short life - he was committed to a psychiatric hospital with a severe bout of depression in 1910, and died of pneumonia there the following year, having never seen his baby daughter - but clearly there's a synaesthesic connection. The two above pictures are part of A Sonata of the Sea, painted in 1908. The first is entitled Allegro, the second Andante and the third Finale.

This gives a further fillip to my longing to visit the third of the Baltic countries - the first two, Estonia and Latvia, I love and respect beyond measure - to see Čiurlionis's house in Vilnius and the gallery containing his pictures. I also ought to think of travelling up to Birmingham to hear the concert, since I'm hooked on the work now. Here's Svetlanov's performance, a bit rough around the edges but right in spirit.

Neeme Järvi: from 1980 to 80

If only I could have made the entire, exceptionally long stretch of Pärnu Festival this year to hear Neeme Järvi in his 80th birthday year conduct the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, and - I gather - an encore with the Academy Orchestra in the first week as well as what I did hear in the second - four terrific concerts from the Estonian Festival Orchestra and its soloists. Alas, Proms duty as speaker called on the intervening Sunday so I couldn't get out there - starting in Latvia, a country I'd never visited before - until last Monday. It's looking as if I may have to wait until next February when Järvi  père is scheduled to conduct the work he's always pleaded to do at the Proms, Tobias's massive oratorio Des Jona Sendung (Jonah's Mission), in Berlin. Well, he told me that the knee problems which had stopped him returning to his beloved Royal Scottish National Orchestra earlier this year - I was all set to go - seem to be sorted, so fingers crossed.

He was, of course, a benevolent presence at the last night in Pärnu, where after the concert older son Paavo, the festival's presiding genius, generously and movingly feted his father as the critical guiding spirit. I got to have a chat with him at the party, and was especially happy with my day's discovery - a copy of one of his 1980 Melodiya recordings of Haydn's symphonies. He's holding it above, flanked by Paavo's two daughters Leah and Ingrid, with Mrs J, Liilia, to the right (two special Pärnu pals can just be made out in the background - New Best Orchestral Friend, horn-player Catherine Eisele, and the wonderful administrator/bassoonist Tea Tuhkur looking on). And an official photographer - not sure who, since this is from a batch on the Estonian Festival Orchestra's Facebook page - caught me leaning earnestly forward from my seat at the feet of the master.

Two of those LPs were released, the rest suppressed and his name wiped from the record when he emigrated to the west later that year. It was also when I first got to hear this then unknown-to-me conductor and orchestra (the Gothenburg Symphony) under circumstances which I explained a couple of years back on the blog. No harm in reproducing a second time the photo taken of him outside the Gothenburg Concert Hall, also from 1980.

Neeme expressed surprise when I showed him the LP, and assumed I'd brought it from London. The circumstances under which I came to it seem serendipitous. I'd bought two Melodiya box sets from the shop on Pärnu's Supeluse, the main road to the beach - one of The Barber of Seville with the great Kozlovsky as Almaviva and Mark Reizen as Basilio, conducted by Samosud,

and the other of Prince Igor with - as I thought - of Lemeshev, Reizen again and Melik-Pashayev conducting. But when I got it back to the hotel, I saw that the booklet actually listed two recordings, and this was the later one under Ermler, which I have on CD. So I took it back and, just as I seemed to be drawing a blank for a replacement - other Melodiya boxes with fun designs turned out to be Soviet pressings of Callas in Lucia and Toscanini's Otello - the shopkeeper brought out another pile of classical LPs. Neeme's early Haydn happened to be among them. Of course I had to get him to sign it some 37 years later.

The performances, which I listened to this morning, are full and spirited, not at all over-romanticised in any way; and of course the humour is fully appreciated.

As Estonian Festival Orchestra clarinettist supreme - and one of the handful of the world's best - Matt Hunt pointed out once we'd rolled on from the concert hall to the nexus of festival socialising, the Passion Cafe in the old town, what wouldn't most of us give to be 80 and propping up a bar at 3am? Neeme finally left shortly after that time to another speech by Paavo, to which he graciously responded,

shared another laugh with Matt and Paavo,

and headed off down the street supported by stick and loyal son (here's leader Florian Donderer, of whom Neeme thinks so highly, heading towards me. With apologies for the poor quality of the night shots - with or without flash, they don't come out very well, but there's no alternative record).

It seems a shame that because I wasn't there, I won't be able to use pictures of NJ's earlier appearances on the Arts Desk piece when it's ready, especially as they were taken by resident masters, Kaupo Kikkas (the first below) and Taavi Kull (the third), with one of many excellent complementary and equally professional shots by David Kornfeld (the intervening triple portrait). So the blog will do. Here he is conducting the brilliant young Academy players at the end of the concert shared by the various conductors on the Masterclasses he takes annually (see some pics from last year here),

with fellow masterclass takers Leonid Grin and Paavo,

and with Paavo at the end of the concert.

Next year, if I'm invited back (and even if I'm not), I have to do it all. In the meantime, coming home was not such a bump since back at the Proms I heard a good-in-parts Schoenberg Gurrelieder from Rattle, a glorious Bach triple whammy on Sunday very much crowned by the best St John Passion I've ever heard live and last night another exceptional Balt, Lithuanian Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, conducting 'her' City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in a dazzling programme. The future looks good in hands like this. Photo courtesy of Chris Christodoulou/BBC.

And now for two concert-free nights with some time for digestion of abundant riches.

UPDATE (24/8) The full Arts Desk report on the Estonian Festival Orchestra's concerts in Pärnu and Jūrmala is now up and running.

Hearing Mirga from a Bodrum hospital

I was meant to be at Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla's first Prom with 'her' City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra last night (images, which reached me swiftly as usual, by Chris Christodoulou for the BBC). Should have flown back from Bodrum on Friday after three blissful days at the D-Marin Classical Music Festival in Turgutreis, featuring great Turks like Fazil Say and newcomers I'd heard and loved in Istanbul alongside the likes of Gautier Capuçon and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich under phenomenal Lionel Bringuier; Arts Desk report anon. But at around 3am I felt terrible pains in the left side of my abdomen. As I was vomiting regularly, I thought it was food poisoning. But the lovely Cansu who'd been looking after me called the paramedics around lunchtime and I was rushed here to the private (ouch!) Acibadem Hospital in Bodrum.

Turned out I had a kidney stone trapped in the passage from the left kidney to the bladder, which had made the kidney dangerously infected; septicemia could have set in soon had it not been caught (praise be to agony!) Odd that, apart from the odd occasion of dark pee, I'd had no notion of this before the pain kicked in. So in I went yesterday for a quick op where they broke up the stone by endoscopy, and here I am now hoping to be discharged this morning and, inshallah, fly home later. The festival people and Jasper Parrott, who invited me to Turgutreis in the first place, have looked after me well; I'm very grateful to them.

In the meantime I was able to hear a couple of Proms on the laptop, starting with most of Iván Fischer's Budapest Festival Orchestra Mozart programme - lovely, limpid sounds in the Clarinet Concerto, spreading balm in this room, but I was too tired to hear all the Requiem through. And what of Mirga, whose first concert with the CBSO The Arts Desk's man in Birmingham, Richard Bratby, was among the few to cover? Difficult to judge from a quietish relay, but her Magic Flute Overture was full of well-articulated life. Hans Abrahamsen's let me tell you should perhaps have been experienced live - as several folk have just confirmed - but I got the impression that both he and Barbara Hannigan (pictured with Mirga below), for all her stratospheric skills, were on this occasion rather fey one-trick ponies (see how telegraphic I can afford to be when I'm not officially reviewing). The discreet tinklings like icicles forming in the vast Albertine colosseum were lovely for a bit, but I wanted more. I fear the dreaded compound word 'sound-world' may crop up a lot in reviews. Again, my feeling is that there have to be 'hooks' as well as 'process'.

As for the Tchaikovsky Fourth, Mirga clearly has the technique to do what she pleases - and did, with some strikingly accelerated crescendos in the first movement's second waltz and development. The second-movement song, though, didn't feel natural, and inorganic tempo changes elsewhere reminded me a bit of Dudamel (not for nothing was Mirga in Los Angeles). The encore, which should have been more correctly identified as the Diamond Fairy's Variation and Coda from Act 3 of The Sleeping Beauty, scintillated; could we hope for the complete ballet from Mirga to outdo Petrenko's glorious Act 3 in Liverpool? I hope so. One thing's for sure: she's a live wire, and will have plenty of time to settle. In the meantime, I look forward to the TAD report of Alexandra Coghlan, who covered the concert in my stead. Later (at Istanbul Airport now for the second leg of the journey home): and here it is. Clearly you had to be there.

29/08 Anyway, I'm back home now after a not too exhausting two-leg journey. Praise be again to the festival folk for fixing me up another flight so quickly.

They also gave me the present of a nazar, an amulet to guard against the evil eye - I've seen it hanging on the doors of hospital rooms in photos. Here it is at home, and below it the ex-voto of a kidney which J was holding up, half-jovially but I suspect with just a bit of that Catholic superstition in his heart, as I came out into Heathrow Terminal 2 Arrivals late on Sunday night.