It was owing to illness that Alan Buribayev, principal conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, had to pull out of last Friday’s concert and one of the most stimulating assignments of the NSO’s current season, the spectacular Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss.
A change in the advertised programme was hardly to be entertained. With quadruple woodwind, an offstage band and a host of percussion, Strauss’s score calls for extra players, of whom about 20 – bringing the complement of the NSO to more than 100 – had been hired.
Of the relief conductors who happened to be available, the proportion listing the Alpine Symphony among their recording credits cannot have been very large. Still, one was found. To the rescue came Jonas Alber, who committed the work to disc with the Staatsorchester Braunschweig during his 19-year stint as its music director.
From the opening call to arms of Beethoven's Fidelio Overture, it was clear that Alber meant business. Nor was his sense of discipline incompatible with a restrained and reflective account of the same composer's Violin Concerto with NSO leader Helena Wood as soloist.
From the outset of the Strauss, where lugubrious brass are set against what ought be a barely audible background shimmer, it was equally clear that this wasn’t going to be one of the work’s more subtle manifestations. Yet whatever the cost to detail, the benefit was a full 50 minutes in which orchestra and audience seemed equally and unremittingly absorbed.
Chen’s Russian repertoire
Taiwan-born super-violinist and style icon Ray Chen made his Irish debut at the National Concert Hall in a programme that could be described as all-Russian if Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's Soviet upbringing can be considered a qualification. Along with Pärt's Fratres were the Violin Sonata No 1 by Prokofiev, the triptych Souvenir d'Un Lieu Cher by Tchaikovsky, and the Divertimento by Stravinsky, itself a reworking of some of the Tchaikovskiana already paraphrased in the younger Russian's ballet The Fairy's Kiss.
Excepting some minor frayed edges in the Pärt, Chen’s execution couldn’t be faulted. The fingerwork and bowing seemed effortless, the intonation constantly rang true, and tone production – via a 1715 Stradivarius from the Joseph Joachim collection – was the epitome of good taste.
Indeed, the interpretation might even have been just a bit too tasteful for Tchaikovsky's wistful Mélodie, where an almost clinical approach kept tissues firmly at bay.
Given Chen's love of social media (he has more than a million SoundCloud followers), it was natural for him to read nearly all the music from a tablet. He turned the virtual pages with wireless toe controls that would have been entirely unobtrusive had they not been so enviably cool. Yet even in the one billed item played from memory, the Souvenir, Chen's gaze still seemed fixed on his absent digital display.
The impression was nearly not so much of attending a live performance as of listening to award-winning recordings of the music, recordings that would have impressed not only through the exquisite athleticism of Chen’s playing but also through the lucid and finely balanced support of French pianist Julien Quentin.
NCH Rising Star award
Young Irish classical musicians honoured since 2005 by the NCH’s annual Rising Star award have included four pianists, two singers, two string players, a flautist and a guitarist. The programme’s horizons were further expanded this year with the selection of a percussionist, the Cork-born Alex Petcu Colan.
Getting a mainstream classical break of this kind is no mean achievement when one’s musical repertoire encompasses a whole family of diverse instruments.
Pianists are not expected to switch to the harpsichord, clavichord or organ, nor do violinists feel obliged to pick up a viola at some point in every concert. For percussionists, however, such adaptability is par for the course.
Petcu Colan’s Rising Star performance was memorable no less for the breadth of technique than for the comparable range of emotion, expression and mood.
There was a nod to the standard repertory in a delicate transfer to vibraphone of Debussy's piano Arabesque No 1, but even this was contextualised by an atmospheric improvisation recalling the French composer's fascination with the Javanese gamelan.
Otherwise, the programme was strictly percussionist’s fare, and it made a fascinating bill.
Whereas the Arabesque drifted across as if the barely tangible memory of a memory, Xenakis's solos for untuned instruments Rebonds B (1988) and Psappha (1975) hit home as uncompromising, in-your-face oratory that somehow allied the intellectually engrossing with the physically explosive.
On the marimba, pleasing subaquatic effects were generated by Tom Lane's Oh Mistress Mine Chorale (composed for last year's Abbey Theatre production of Twelfth Night), while the transcendental Velocities (1990) by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Joseph Schwantner lived up to its name with panache.
Although Petcu Colan might well have sustained the whole night’s music-making on his own, the urge was collaborative and brought in his well- known violin-playing sister Ioana Petcu Colan, the Cork- based men’s choir CanTúr and fellow young percussionists Caitríona Frost, Maeve O’Hara and Chris Stynes.
Amid a wide variety of instrumental combinations, violin and marimba was perhaps the least convincing. But that was a matter of disparate tone qualities and reflected neither on the sensitive duet playing nor the disciplined flair of composer Sam Perkin, whose cogently dialogic Prelude and Fugue (2011) called only for more drily rhetorical articulation.
Nigel Westlake's Omphalo Centric Lecture (1984) for four marimbas was a model of synchronisation; Manfred Menke's slapstick table-top quartet Eine kleine Tischmusik (1991) proved an audience favourite.
In an evening of ear-openers, two of the most notable were by Nebojsa Jovan Zivkovic: part of the Trio per uno (1995/99); and Uneven Souls (1992), a marimba concerto in all but name with accompaniment for three percussionists and male voices. The news that this Serbian is among the world's most influential living percussion composers has still to reach the editors of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. But given the advocacy of a Petcu Colan, that should only be a matter of time.
Michael Dervan is on leave
