October 25 & 26, 2024
Martin-Marietta Center for the Performing Arts
Raleigh, North Carolina – USA
North Carolina Symphony; Carlos Miguel Prieto, conductor; Philippe Quint, violin.
Johannes BRAHMS: Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a
Errollyn WALLEN: Violin Concerto (2024)
Lora KVINT (orch. Sergei Tararin): Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra
Jean SIBELIUS: Symphony No. 2, Op. 43 (2024)
Christopher Hill | 22 OCT 2024
The ambitious program presented by the North Carolina Symphony on Friday and Saturday, October 25–26, included not just one but two premieres, one local and one world. To provide a musical baseline, if you will, for these new and potentially challenging works, Maestro Carlos Miguel Prieto opened the concert with Brahms’ much loved 1873 orchestral Variationen über ein Thema von Jos. Haydn, nowadays sometimes called “St. Anthony Variations” since the theme is not actually by Haydn himself (though he used it).
In the day this idea of using theme and variations for a stand-alone orchestral work was novel, chiefly because the theme-and-variations form had been used hundreds of times by Classic and early Romantic composers for technical display. In reviving it for late-Romantic (i.e., expressive) orchestral use, Brahms, perhaps contentiously, seemed to declare that the Classic period still had many ideas usable within the expanded narrative capabilities of Romantic-period musical language.
This is exactly how Mr. Prieto and the orchestra performed the piece, with sculpted, almost marble-like perfection of sonority and phrasing. Brahms, they seemed to declare, aspired to Beauty not only as an expression but as an exemplification of Perfection.
Brahms was followed by what arguably was the major work of the evening, a new Violin Concerto by Errollyn Wallen, current Master of the King’s Music in England. Ms. Wallen, who was present for the performance, was born in tropical British Honduras (now Belize) and currently spends much of her time in a lighthouse on the northern coast of Scotland. You can see that she likes challenges. Her concerto was written for New York–based violinist Philippe Quint, whom, in the program notes, she thanks for collaborating “in such a fruitful and enjoyable way.”
The solo part appears (to this non-violinist) fiendishly difficult as well as catholic in its coverage of just about every technique available to the instrument (when plucked or played with a standard bow). In this case, the instrument was the 1708 “Ruby” Stradivarius, on which Mr. Quint handled all difficulties with a display of striking character and aplomb.
In this concerto Ms. Wallen writes in a manner that mixes the luxuriance and warmth of, say, Korngold’s Violin Concerto with the post-modern sound world of, say, Sofia Guibalina’s Second Violin Concerto. There are also, to be sure, many personal passages in her concerto, each artfully calculated and deployed (in the best sense), evidence of musical passions Ms. Wallen has tenaciously maintained throughout her career.
The work opens delicately, like chamber music for harp, violin, horn, and percussion. Is there a tune or theme? This is the wrong question, for it’s not how the concerto seems to be composed. In its outer movements, on the architectural level, Ms. Wallen uses collage techniques, in which different musical episodes are juxtaposed more often than they are connected, yet with the episodes arranged to broadly approximate the dramatic arch of a traditional violin concerto. Climactic passages come more or less at the points where you might expect them, even though they don’t come (on first hearing) “from” anything specific.
Again, in the concerto’s outer movements, Ms. Wallen’s raw melodic materials, whatever they might be — her musical surface — seem to have long since been “digested” by processes of continuous variation before what we hear was committed to its final version in score. In maintaining coherence in these outer movements, recognizable harmonic progressions, rhythms, and instrumental timbres would then seem more important than recognizable melodies.
According to the composer, the middle movement features “a lullaby, ‘Shlof Mayn Fegele,’ sung to the young Philippe [Quint] by his grandfather.” This melodic material, presented with tenderness and simplicity, gives the work its emotional core, one Mr. Quint knew how to deliver most affectingly.
The final movement traces a path from its opening violent gestures to a vibrant and affirmative reimagining of those gestures at the close. In between, lyrical episodes alternate with more dramatic ones, sometimes spiced with lush harmonies and always overlaid with rapid passagework and strong gestures from the soloist. At the end, the audience received this work with more than polite applause. Clearly, a sizeable proportion of the people liked what they heard. This post-modern concerto has legs.
As, in effect, a most generous encore, Mr. Quint remained onstage to present a work his mother wrote for him. Lora Kvint has been well known in her Russian homeland since Soviet times as a writer of songs, musicals, and film music. Among other works, she is noted for her 1988 rock opera, Giordano, her 2015 musical, The Count of Monte Cristo, and over sixty songs recorded by popular vocalists. Her Odyssey Rhapsody, a ten-minute excursion into purely instrumental music, was written for her son Philippe and given its premiere performances by him during the concerts reviewed here.
According to the anonymous program annotation, the music depicts Odysseus’s “decision to go to war with the Trojans, the pleas of his devoted wife, Penelope, the turbulent seas and storms, the encounter with the enchanting yet perilous sirens, and the triumphant return and celebration of salvation.” In Sergei Tararin’s orchestration, these episodes unfold with great color and verve. For instance, the world of the sirens sounds every bit as seductively Mediterranean as Ibert’s Éscales, even as it becomes more complex and dark. Here and in other lyrical passages, Ms. Kvint’s gift for melody shines. As for the dramatic passages, her depiction of turbulent seas and storms avoids time-worn musical clichés and her celebratory ending surely deserves Terpsichore’s seal of approval.
Mr. Prieto and the orchestra returned after intermission with the Second Symphony by Jean Sibelius. Over the last year, balances within the sections of the NCSO have become increasingly refined, and your reviewer would be hard put to think of a work better suited for displaying that refinement than Sibelius’s Second, with its wealth of passages in which homogeneous instrumental choirs play instrumentally idiomatic materials. The NCSO makes gorgeous sounds when playing this symphony.
In writing this work, Sibelius challenged himself to see how much variety he could wrest from three simple stepwise notes, either rising or falling. It turns out quite a bit, and after three movements of creative variations on this little melodic cell, in the fourth, the composer pulls out of his pocket one of late Romanticism’s memorable Big Tunes, also created from the same fragment. It’s a neat trick, but Sibelius doesn’t stop there. The closing theme in the last movement takes listeners back to brooding darkness for a bardic-sounding minor tune that eventually mutates into a brilliant major and subsequent martial fanfares.
In the exposition this bardic tune is repeated twice (thus three in total), but in the recap it repeats no fewer than five times (thus six in total, if I count correctly). That’s a lot of repetition, and making it meaningful is one of the key interpretive challenges in this finale. The following chorale-slash-hymn seals the deal for the symphony as a whole (in terms of musical argument) by having the ubiquitous three-note fragment grow into a noble four-note one that takes the urgent and insistent phrase capping the first movement’s development and inverts it, in both intervals and mood. Pretty slick! It’s the sort of thing Sibelius must have been thinking about when, a few years later, he and Mahler exchanged views on writing symphonies.
The Second Symphony is performed fairly often by Nordic, English, American, Japanese, Dutch, and German orchestras but infrequently by orchestras in countries with Romance languages, such as France, Italy, and Spain. Meanwhile, in recent years a new generation — conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Klaus Mäkelä — has found new ways to present the Sibelius Second Symphony, challenging others to do likewise.
Mr. Prieto’s approach to the score was, indeed, unlike any other I’ve heard, being exceptionally broad and even Brucknerian. Some conductors (Rattle and Berglund, for instance) play all four movements briskly. Some others (Karajan and Barbirolli, for example) play the first three movements briskly and then take the last movement at a measured pace. Maazel and Pittsburgh take the outer movements slowly and the inner movements faster. Mr. Prieto takes all four movements at a measured pace, and in this his reading perhaps most resembles Kurt Sanderling and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, whose Sibelius cycle is one of the most highly regarded.
As mentioned, gorgeous timbres were often in the air, but at all times structure and scale were emphasized over the dramatic local detail someone like, say, Ashkenazy might bring out. Your reviewer would be remiss not to mention that, as with the earlier Brahms, there is something undeniably warm-hearted about Mr. Prieto’s brand of classicism. The audience viscerally responded to this reading, cheering the orchestra and its conductor effusively while standing up, with various war whoops erupting around the auditorium during the conductor’s curtain call. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- North Carolina Symphony: ncsymphony.org
- Carlos Miguel Prieto: carlosmiguelprieto.com
- Philippe Quint: philippequint.com
- Errollyn Wallen: errollynwallen.com
Read more by Christopher Hill.