THE DUBLIN debut of Antonio Pappano with the London Symphony Orchestra(NCH, Monday 13th) was an all-20th-century affair. It was also an all-romantic affair, although that's not how it might have appeared in advance.
Pappano opened with Rachmaninov's brooding 1909 symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead.The work was prompted by a viewing of a reproduction of the painting of the same name by Arnold Böcklin. The evening's concerto was Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto (with one of the LSO's leaders, Roman Simovic, as soloist), a work whose 1947 premiere provoked the unforgettable put-down "more corn than gold" from the New York Sun's Irving Kolodin. Korngold, a child prodigy who impressed the likes of Richard Strauss in early 20th-century Vienna, became an Academy Award-winning Hollywood composer, and used material from some of Hollywood scores for the concerto.
Bartók’s 1943 Concerto for Orchestra, which ended the concert, is often treated as an orchestral showpiece, pure and simple, though not usually as a romantic one. Pappano sidelined the piece’s relationship with Bartók’s grittier side, and treated the music as if it were on the same continuum as Rachmaninov and Korngold. You might think this an outrageous approach. But the evidence is that, when it came to performing, Bartók himself was a romantic through and through. He left a sizeable legacy of recordings, and one of the most revealing is of a concert he gave with the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti at the Library of Congress in 1940. This shows him indulging in the mannerisms of romantic pianism as freely in his own music as in that of Beethoven and Debussy. So Pappano can surely argue that he has authenticity on his side.
Pappano's music-making was exceptionally fluid. Yet the relentless lapping of the opening of The Isle of the Dead, ever moving yet somehow ever still, was brought off with the right sense of mysterious foreboding. The piece's climaxes were unerringly paced, and the quiet ending showed how fully Rachmaninov had fulfilled Böcklin's suggestion that his painting "must produce such an effect of stillness that anyone would be frightened to hear a knock on the door".
Roman Simovic’s lean-toned and agile account of the Korngold may not have pleased fans of the work who like it for its schmaltziness. But the piece is a little beyond the full appreciation of my musical sweet tooth, and I warmed to the effective reserve of the approach.
Pappano’s Bartók was an unusual exercise in almost loose-limbed collective virtuosity. It’s a piece that most conductors seem to like keeping on a tight rein. Pappano allowed his players to sound unleashed in a way that softened contours, and often blended colours in unusual ways. It was an idiosyncratic but persuasive perspective: the concerto rarely sounds as good in concert as it did on this occasion.
* New York's Argento Chamber Ensemble(NCH Kevin Barry Room, Wednesday) presented a nicely structured programme, articulated to peak at the end of each half. The opening piece, Michel Galante's Kreutzerspielfor violin (David Fulmer) and piano (the composer himself), worries some material from Beethoven's KreutzerSonata, as if it has found its way into a hall of mirrors, and is locked into a pattern of shimmering reflections. Heinz Holliger's Tremafor solo viola (Stephanie Griffin), which opened the second half, trembles and flickers with a kind of compulsive nervousness, from which stronger sounds appear like coded messages.
The central works of each half were less successful, David Fulmer's Verlöschendfor soprano saxophone (Eliot Gattegno) sounded too much like an exercise, and Siobhán Cleary's new Psychopompfor ensemble relied too much on bluntness of contrast.
The evening's other pieces stole the show. Enno Poppe's Holz, for solo clarinet (Carol McGonnell) and ensemble takes the clarinet into cartoonish extremes of virtuosity. The sounds were at times so outlandish that if McGonnell's exertions had caused her to emit steam or smoke, or levitate, or bounce off the walls, it would have seemed fully in keeping with the energy of the often manic, shrieking sounds she was making.
Philippe Hurel's Figures libresfor ensemble begins in a manner that's jazzily jaunty and playful, setting up a clear reference point for the diversification which follows. The piece has a sense of round and round we go, but achieves this without ever feeling that it's gone the same way twice.
* The Sacred Symphonies series by Mark Duley's choir Resurgamreached its apex at City Hall on Saturday. Three weekly programmes based around the music of the Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli might seem a little recherché. But that's not how Dublin music lovers saw it, and on Saturday it was, literally, a case of standing room only.
The concerts weren’t purely choral. There were instrumental items from organist Malcolm Proud, and the members of the QuintEssential Sackbut and Cornett Ensemble, and also works that mixed voices and instruments in a dizzying variety of combinations – string players from the Irish Baroque Orchestra were also involved.
The combinations were varied not just in numbers and make-up, but also in a range of spatial layouts around City Hall’s rotunda – both the second and third programmes included full, surround experiences for the audience, with singers behind the listeners as well as in front.
In truth, the performances were uneven in achievement. Some of the cornett playing served mainly to remind one how challenging this ancient, strangely curved instrument is to play. Some of the singing was rather too routine, and not all of the pieces sung one-to-a-part were entirely secure. But the sequences were always nicely varied, the sackbuts (precursors of the trombone) always gorgeously sonorous, and the peaks amply compensated for the troughs.
The most memorable pieces in the closing concert were Suscipe clementissime, creating a richly tangled, doleful darkness, Timor et tremor, the slow, pealing choral sonorities of its implorations rolling like waves, and the closing 33-part Magnificat (as reconstructed by Hugh Keyte) was the epitome of spatial choral splendour.
