Zoom courses: from Nielsen to Mahler

After four Zoom terms on Russian music, one apiece on Czech and Hungarian, then homing in on great symphonists Sibelius, Vaughan Williams and Nielsen, it's time for the Big One: Mahler, starting this summer (tomorrow - Thursday 20, to be precise) with the first half, Symphonies 1-5, Das klagende Lied and the songs, then continuing in September with 6-10 and Das Lied von der Erde.

Not that Nielsen has any less status in my eyes, now that I've spent 10 weeks with the great but modest Dane. His essential robustness kept me buoyant, along with the sheer joy and richesse of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, through those not-too-awful five weeks of radio- and chemotherapy. 

As well as getting to know underrated piano masterpieces like the Chaconne and Theme with Variations, my admiration for Nielsen's consistently original but ever more extraordinary symphonic journey has gone through the roof. The second movement of the Fifth, unquestionably one of the 20th century's greatest symphonies, has long been my favourite finale, infinitely rich, but the continuation of the journey in the opening movement of the Sixth, so misleadingly (jokily?) named Sinfonia Semplice, takes us one step further. Passages from it were running through my head for weeks. Lucky that we have this superb performance from Paavo Järvi with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra on YouTube.

It seems beyond doubt, to me at least, that Nielsen's recent heart attack fed into the weirdnesses and frenzies here, no less than Mahler's arrythmia informs the peaks and troughs in the first movement of his Ninth Symphony. But I love equally the way Nielsen takes apart the machinery in the rest of the Sixth, making sure never to lose sight of the first movement's essence. 

So there will be plenty to connect Nielsen and Mahler, even if the timeframes of their works are different. I must say that, still in the thick of Nielsenmania, I found it hard to adjust to the scale of Mahler's Third live at the Festival Hall with the Philharmonia - another Paavo performance, which might have been even more revelatory with one of his regular orchestras. But enough time has elapsed to return to Mahler's own very specific world - even though I'm lucky enough to be returning to Denmark, following the amazing time I had celebrating Nielsen's 150th anniversary, to hear performances of Hymnus Amoris (such an opportunity) and the Second Symphony, as well as to look at the new Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense. 

Here are the full details (click to enlarge) for the coming Mahler term - still time to sign up if you're interested. And you can get the videos if you can't attend on the day.

Pärnu festival spirit - felt from afar

For the first time in seven years - yes, I even got to go to Estonia last summer, my only foreign travel in 2020 - I had to miss my favourite music festival in the world. Plans were laid, flights (reluctantly, since it's something I'm still trying to avoid) and hotels booked. Then my mother was rushed into hospital and, though much better by the time I was due to leave, still needed daily visits from me: when you're 90, your morale is the thing that most needs sustaining (she's home and in good spirits now). 

I have no doubt I did the right thing; I discovered natural beauties on the way to and from the cottage hospital, and I saw wonders operatic in London as some compensation. Every Pärnu concert, moreover, was filmed and streamed live on the website's TV channel for free (last year there was a very reasonable charge). You can still watch until the end of the month (tbc). The images here are all by photographic artist Kaupo Kikkas, an essential presence at every festival and one of quite a few good friends made in Pärnu (I know which are the real ones by now...) OK, the lineup is seriously blokey, but we've had soloists like Lisa Batiashvili and Viktoria Mullova at past festivals.

I'll confess I still have to see some of the events featuring the excellent Academy Orchestra; the first priority was the three Estonian Festival Orchestra concerts under doyen Paavo Järvi (he sent a very nice recorded message to say I was missed via the wonderful Lucy Maxwell-Stewart, who organised everything as usual). I get the feeling that each of the top soloists was inspired to give of his very best, working with that warmest of super-orchestras and conductors. It was vital to Paavo to get the pianist Lars Vogt along; the pianist has spoken so eloquently and with amazing perspective of his cancer here in an interview in  VAN Magazine, and we hope with all our hearts that he will pull through. Here are conductor and soloist together.

What follows is nothing like a review - it's some time since I watched the first concerts, after all - but a general impression remains that Vogt's playing in Mozart's C minor Concerto, K491, was on a level of sensitivity and response to everything around that I've not experienced before. Of course the wind, so crucial in the Larghetto, are among the best in the world - but this time I listened as much to the piano as I did to them. What a perfect encore, too, consolation and sorrow side by side so lightly etched in Brahms's  A major Intermezzo, Op. 118. 

The EFO repeated much of the same programme the following evening, but with Dvořák's Violin Concerto replacing the Mozart. Unlike that masterpiece, the Dvořák isn't among my concerto favourites, and memories of Truls Mørk in the Cello Concerto at the 2019 festival were still vivid. 

So I was taken aback by the sheer agile, febrile intensity with which Joshua Bell played it - again, visibly inspired by his colleagues, and sweating more than any of them (it was very hot and humid in Parnu that week, I'm told. You wouldn't hear this work played at a high pitch of brilliance anywhere.

I'll confess I was a bit disappointed in the choice of works announced for the visit of Emmanuel Pahud, the world's finest living flautist (that I know of - if anyone else has other information let me know). After all, Mozart's Flute Concerto isn't even as interesting as the one for flute and harp, and it seemed odd to resort to an orchestration of Poulenc's Flute Sonata. Why not Nielsen? 

But Pahud's artistry is compelling in itself, and there was a delicious surprise before the Mozart minuet finale - the perfectly apt interpolation of Arvo Pärt's Estländler (2006/2009). It's a joy to watch the amusement and pleasure of the orchestra's flutes, too, especially the smiles of Maarika Järvi (Paavo's sister, such a lovely person), as Paavo holds up the score for Pahud to follow.  I loved the complicity of the EFO woodwind, too, in Lennox Berkeley's Poulenc arrangement. The encore after the whole audience went wild a second time was Debussy's Syrinx - again, hard to imagine a more perfect arrangement.

There was equal magic from the players of the magnificent EFO - I persist in thinking it's like the Lucerne Festival Orchestra when Abbado was alive - in the chamber gala, always a highlight. I was, of course, cheering on my treasured friends Andres Kaljuste and Sophia Rahman, who were honouring the Tubin works in one of the main programmes - more anon - by performing the composer's transcription for viola of his Saxophone Sonata (1951). 

Not perhaps a work in which you can spot a clear identity - the second movement is utterly different in style from the first - but these two top musicians made magic of it.

The whole programme was well programmed as a classical/romantic sandwich with Estonian filling - on the other side of the interval came the sublime simplicity of Ester Mägi's Duos in National Idiom (1983). What a supremely subtle artist is Sharon Roffman, someone else I've come to treasure through Pärnu acquaintance, duetting with Maarika. 

I'm so proud that we picked a Mägi winner for the Europe Day Concert back in May - everyone loved the compact mood-shifts of The Sea. Any excuse to go back to that great concert, rendered all the more moving in this case by the nearly-100-year old composer's death the following week: I'll post the YouTube film without further comment.

Back at the Pärnu gala, let's just say about the horn quartet transcription of Carmen interludes that the work itself is a terrible mistake - there are other bits of the opera that would actually work in this combination. But it was so delightfully presented by another of the world's best instrumentalists, Alec Frank-Gemmill, and done with such visual panache that I shouldn't be too hard on it.

Here's another of Kaupo's best, of Alec in action. Not for nothing does KK have a reputation as the best photographer of musicians in the business.

As for the grand chamber finale, I kinda thought, Mozart Clarinet Quintet again, really? But never underestimate the creative takes of the orchestra's chief mascot, Matt Hunt. What fantasies he wrought with ornamentations on repeats; what freedom from all five players. I've never heard a performance of a great masterpiece quite as alive as this. Theodor Sink - star of last year's festival in Lepo Sumera's Cello Concerto - seemed perpetually tickled and delighted to be playing alongside the great clarinettist

and look at the fun - you may need to click to enlarge - shared between these two, leader Florian Donderer (playing viola on this occasion), fellow front-desker (and leader of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, another fine soloist too) Triin Ruubel and second violinist Emma Yoon.

Kaupo also took some great shots of Florian playing - this is just one.

A final note about the other orchestral works in the main programmes. Again, nothing had excited me in the prospectus. But while Tubin's Music for Strings of 1963 is so typical of much sombre music produced around that time, there are some real firecrackers in the suite from the ballet score Kratt (The Goblin, 1938-43, rev. 1960), and a chance for so many of the players to shine. Here's the unique trumpet of Vladislav Lavrik in the lineup.

About the premiere in the main concerts, Ülo Krigul's The Bow, I have nothing more to say than that when a new work starts with bells and dissonant brass, you know how it's going to go. Infinitely more fresh is Berwarld's Fourth ('Naive') Symphony of 1845. I actually used it as a stick to beat an entirely derivative symphony composed a century later, Ruth Gipps's Second Symphony, a waste of 20 well-executed minutes in the CBSO Prom on Thursday. The Swedish composer must have been a happy and wholesome kind of chap. A lot of his best ideas seem to stem from the fairy music of Mendelssohn, but have their own identity, like the quirky syncopated second theme of the Naive's first movement, delectably counterpointed by bassoon second time around. I'm now on a Berwald binge, courtesy of Järvi senior's two-CD set of the four symphonies with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Not on YouTube, so I give you  a mono recording by Igor Markevitch and the Berlin Philharmonic.

This is lovely, but the affection and light-spiritedness of the Estonian Festival Orchestra is even finer. Watch these concerts while you still can.

Love and joy at the 2020 Pärnu Music Festival

My good friend and visionary artist-photographer Kaupo Kikkas took so many inspired shots at this year's brilliantly successful festival in Estonia's summer capital, and I could only include a few in my Arts Desk eulogy. So to rekindle what seems as each day passes ever more like an unreal experience - that it all happened and that I got to go both feel miraculous - I thought I'd interweave his photos with my own from the time I spent along the eight-mile white sand bay and the river. These mostly come from the single day when I wasn't in town attending rehearsals or meeting friends, and I'll take them in order.

A heatwave was holding up for the first couple of days, and the main beach was packed - Estonians could do this, as within their country they've kept healthy and observed the lockdown as well as the border closings as prophylactics, rather than to stop the disease spreading further.

As a self-distancing foreigner, but by inclination anyway, I headed east to where the dunes begin to take over.

Now we'll do a three-by-three format. Over to the musicians: up top, the double-bass quartet, from left clockwise Regina Udod, Juliane Bruckmann, Angie Liang, Siret Lust. That in fact is the perfect disposition in terms of how the Estonian Festival Orchestra was originally conceived: two players from a top western orchestra (Bruckmann from Paavo's Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Liang a regular in the La Scala Orchestra, and based in Milan), two Estonians (though Siret now has, or had until the shutdown, quite a career playing in several London orchestras).

Paavo Järvi should now light the way. I was so impressed, when I watched the film of the new Tõnu Kõrvits work, To the Moonlight, by his clairvoyance which clearly guided this impressionistic dream-world. Kaupo has captured that here.

The undisputed star of the four concerts I heard was young Theodor Sink, and the work he played - Lepo Sumera's Cello Concerto really is a neglected masterpiece (see the Arts Desk review for more on that).

First night standing ovation. Should have really happened for the Sumera, but had to wait until the encores.

Beach 2 That baking morning, I wanted to swim, but first to do a circuit of the boardwalk around the eastern nature reserve (the western one is more secluded). Some of the cows who help to 'manage' the landscape were sheltering under a willow tree

while one was grazing the other side of the boardwalk.

The water's surface was covered with damselflies and dragonflies, but in flight they don't catch, so here's a broader perspective.

KK 2 From the chamber gala: a close up of two out of five in Hasenöhrl's much-snippeting arrangement/deconstruction of Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel [Einmal Anders], both peerless in their solos: Emma Yoon and Alec Frank-Gemmill;

and the full ensemble, also featuring Juliane Bruckmann, Rie Koyama and Signe Sõmer, a real match for her fellow clarinettist in terms of personality.

Next came Maarika Järvi, taking over the violin line on flute, Giorgios Katsouris and Teet Järvi in Schubert's String Trio in B flat major:

Beach 3 My bathing spot, as far as you can get heading towards Latvia before the reeds take over.

The only snag is that while the waters of the bay are perfect for kids, you have to wade a long way out before you can swim, and even then the sandbanks rise in places. I actually walked back for most of the way in the shallow waters parallel to the beach, observing the cumulus clouds massing inland - a storm would not hit us until the next morning -

and looking fondly back over the expanse where nature truly takes over.

KK 3 More from the chamber gala: the super-elegant and friendly Triin Ruubel and Matt Hunt reprise their brilliant interpretation of Bartók's Contrasts, previously shared with my now very good friend Sophia Rahman - she had arranged a performance of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time with Matt, which the festival couldn't accommodate, so they did it up at the beautiful Arvo Pärt Centre on the Lohusalu Peninsula - but now with the star of the next day Olli Mustonen.

Top that? Well, nothing could, but the Mendelssohn Octet matched it. What came to mind as Florian Donderer led a performance of supernatural airborne grace was my friend Anthony Gardner's first novel, The Rivers of Heaven, describing in visionary terms the life of a child in a parallel world before it's born. Mendelssohn was very young when he wrote this, but the music still somes to come from somewhere else.

Especially striking here were the contributions of Eva Bindere and young Hans Christian Aavik, clearly the latest Estonian prodigy. Here they are playing in the EFO with Florian.

The other players are also outstanding: Mari Poll, Xandi van Dijk, Karin Sarv, Thomas Ruge and the very busy Sink.

Beach/river 3 Long evening concerts and revelry thereafter usually rule sunsets out. But this time I caught one late afternoon (ie 6.30-7.30) stroll out to the stone jetty at the west end of the beach and one sunset, simply because the adored Passion Cafe is too hugger-mugger inside for a Brit to risk spreading possible infection, and it soon got too cold to sit out (I did see the lovely host Maarika at the final concert, and amused her by hailing her in hybrid terms as 'Madame La Passione'. Adorable lady). Thus flotsam on the edge of the west-end nature reserve.

and where, beneath the board walk, the sand meets the reeds

with the view across the river to the wood factory and a bank of gulls.

KK 4 The final concert of the Järvi Academy Youth Symphony Orchestra featuring 12 conducting participants of the Academy Course reached the usual high standards in playing, alongside tellingly varied results from the conductors. Inevitable highlight was Berlin Philharmonic principal horn-player Stefan Dohr in Mozart's Third Horn Concerto (pictured here with young conductor Jaan Ots).

His Messiaen encore was stunning, his conducting not so (I've written about this on the Arts Desk feature). Xandi was just right, I think, for the tender lyricism of the Adagio in Dvořák's Sixth Symphony. I wish I'd been there for his earlier collaboration with Triin Ruubel and the Academy Sinfonietta in Erkki-Sven Tüür's Second Violin Concerto, "Angel's Share"; it's so impressive in the film. Here they are together.

As I wrote in the Arts Desk piece, it wouldn't be fair to choose a "winner" from the student conductors, though I was happy to note the huge improvement in the technique and presence of the delightful Nele Erastus. I used Kaupo's picture of her over there, so let's see former Prima Ballerina Maria Seletskaja in confident action (she first made her mark at last year's festival).

Beach/river 4 Now we're at my sunset stroll after the chamber concert, when the fading light was beckoning. The sun actually went down before I got to the mouth of the river - I hastily caught its last appearance.

This time the ducks which hang around this bank of the river - Eiders, I thought at first, but there was no evidence of the melancholy whooping - were more in evidence.

So out to the beach, with views across to the stone jetty and the headland with the solitary tree where the cattle usually graze.

KK 5 Many of Kaupo's best portraits were gathered at the rehearsal before the second EFO concert as well as its aftermath. How well he's captured the watchfulness, intelligence and humanity of the players. I love this shot of oboist Jose Luis Garcia Vegara.

Siret in action.

And of course the money shot of Olli Mustonen with keyboard lashes (best enlarged).

Beach/river 5 Out to sea,

across the river mouth

and towards the dunes.

KK 6 Paavo in action with the most joyous and also the most fine-tuned Mozart 39 I've ever heard,

Matt sharing a joke with Signe - two clarinettists of great character - with Maarika and Paul Suss in front of them.

And a final salute between players who would so love to have hugged and kissed at the end as they usually do.

Beach/people 6 At the west end, before the mosquitoes got too much.

Plus two happy people pics of my own: interval drinks with Jonathan Bloxham, erstwhile cellist in the orchestra, conducting trainee and now well into his international career as a conductor, Alec Frank-Gemmill, new principal conductor of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra Olari Elts and his son;

and just before the last concert I attended, lifeblood of festival admin and former contrabassoonist in the orchestra Tea Tuhkur - now heading to a new job with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra - and Maarit Kangron, cellist and agent with IMG Artists, staying in Estonia for the foreseeable future.

A final sunset from the concert-hall windows in the interval

and sunrise from my hotel room on the morning of departure.

One last shot from Kaupo, of Olli Mustonen and Matt after their Bartók. Roll on 2021, but I think we've all had our vision.