Musikverein, Vienna
Haydn – Violin Concerto in C
major, Hob.VIIa/1
Thomas Adès – Concentric PathsMendelssohn – Symphony no.3 in A minor, 'Scottish', op.56
Augustin Hadelich (violin)
Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich
Kazuki Yamada (conductor)
This was, as ‘they’ say, a
concert of two halves: two violin concertos in the first, in truly excellent
performances by Augustin Hadelich; a symphony in the second, let down by
uncomprehending conducting by Kazuki Yamada. Unifying the two halves was the
splendid, dark-hued, ‘old German’ playing of the Lower Austrian Tonkünstler Orchestra.
It had been far too long since I had heard them – three years ago, in fact, in a wonderful Mahler Second – but it was a delight to hear them once again,
aided of course by the fabled warmth of the Musikverein acoustic.
Let me get the Mendelssohn out
of the way: a real pity, given the depth of bass tone we heard from the
orchestra. The first movement benefited from a beautifully grave opening, which
really seemed to be leading somewhere. Alas, there was far less of a sense to
that in the ensuing Allegro poco agitato,
which, under Yamada, progressed only sectionally, with little impression of an
overarching line, let alone of the dynamism inherent in Mendelssohn’s form. The
scherzo is marked Vivace non troppo;
not only did Yamada disregard ‘non troppo’ but he substituted Presto. His podium dancing was
eye-catching, if unfortunate. The great Adagio,
beautifully dark in orchestral colour, again proceeded fitfully, bar by bar.
Gravity came through by virtue of the playing, but the conductor needed to make
the music sound more at ease with itself. A hard-driven finale made me long to
hear the same orchestra play the symphony with another conductor.
In retrospect, it became even
more clear that the Haydn C major Concerto had been the soloist’s
interpretation. Cultivated playing from both Hadelich and the orchestra was a
joy from beginning to end: such a delightful change from the world of ‘authenticke’
grotesquerie some curious souls claim to favour in Classical music. In the
first movement, everything simply sounded ‘right’: the tempo, rhythm, phrasing,
articulation, harmonic motion, and so forth. Hadelich’s double-stopping was
despatched with just as much beauty as his more lyrical lines, likewise his
cadenza. The slow movement breathed air similar to, although not quite
identical to, Mozart’s Salzburg. Lovely orchestral pizzicato heightened the
resemblance: delightful! The finale was lively without that wearying need some
soloists show to scream ‘high octane’. Most important, it was true to the work’s
– and the performance’s – character; it acted as a finale.
I have often felt ambivalent
about Thomas Ades’s music, but gained a much stronger impression from this work
for violin and concerto, Concentric Paths.
Although in the ‘traditional’ three movements, there was nothing Classical
about their respective weighting, the second, ‘Paths’, clearly the weightiest
as well as the longest. The striking, circling (?) opening put me in mind of a
composer wanting – fair enough – to have his quasi-minimalist or indeed his quasi-modernist
cake and eat it. As the concerns of this first movement, ‘Rings’, came more
clearly into focus, I was often put in mind, not unpleasingly, of Prokofiev.
Hadelich’s cleanness of tone was just as striking, however high-lying his part –
and sometimes it is very high indeed. Frustrated and sometimes non-frustrated
lyricism were often apparent, the intensity of dialogue between the soloist and
other soloists from within the orchestra – taking up figures from each other,
developing them – a particular joy. Shards, gestures, fragments and more of
melodies: the second movement opened as if one were hearing only part of a
greater whole, which again seemed to come into focus, and with a particularly
strong sense of drama. The tuba, perhaps inevitably, put me in mind of Fafner –
but Fafner with a sense of decidedly non-Wagnerian irony. Again, Prokofiev did
not seem so very far away at times. Disjuncture of meter offer a decidedly
irregular – in more than one sense – basis and/or topping to the third
movement, ‘Rounds’. A Prokofiev-like combination of lyricism and the
mechanistic is engendered with decidedly more (post-)modernistic means – and that, too, was
how it sounded in performance.
