The concert was given before a crowded and
attentive house, and had as a whole a stirring and positive impact, the more so
since the orchestra can boast three new appointments (including an associate
concert master and a principal clarinettist) plus a cadet in the trombone
section – all causes for celebration. (Review by Dr David Smith)
World Symphony Summer Series, Concert 1 (February 29, 2024) in the Playhouse Opera.
To initiate this summer’s season, the KZNPO performed under the baton of the Israeli conductor Talia Ilan and featured as soloist the young German cellist Benedict Kloeckner. The main works were staples of the orchestral repertoire: Dvořák’s cello concerto and Schumann’s Symphony No. 4, while the overture and encore proved, in completely different ways, highly rewarding.
Dvořák treats the concerto genre with respect for its broadest features – the three-movement structure and certain familiar formal aspects within them, the recurring passages of advanced technical playing, in particular – but these are enveloped in his own aesthetic: here, the expected liveliness gives ground to grandioso moments but chiefly to lyricism, to a slow procession of harmonies, and to a restfulness of ever-changing tints. Kloeckner led the playing, drawing conductor and orchestra along with him by the intensity of his approach. He devoured the virtuoso aspects, and pressed the lyricism to his heart, with perhaps a touch too much suspense at certain rhetorical points.
Any hesitations of this sort were swept away by Kloeckner’s ‘encore’, an account of Giovanni Sollima’s Lamentatio (1998). It is a solo tour-de-force espoused by so many younger cellists that it has now won an unusual prominence. Involving vocal keening along with the instrumental melody, the work represents a memorial to the million Armenian victims slaughtered in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Kloeckner’s account was both reverent and visceral, beautifully encompassing the quick-changing moods of the piece – the sombre, the jagged, the folk-inspired – and rounded off his evening’s work in high style.
Schumann’s fourth symphony was actually the second of his four numbered symphonies, and shares with his first symphony – they were both written in 1841 – the dynamism that flowed from his rapturous love for and marriage to Clara Wieck, as well as the exhilaration as the composer tested himself in the most public of his musical utterances up to that time.
Thursday’s was a ‘Move along!’ reading, free of the foot-dragging that used to be considered a necessary part of the score’s profundity. In a work so central to Romanticism per se, we have moved away from the exaggerated expression that marked a phase of (late) Romantic interpretation. The lively, headlong approach adopted by Ms Ilan tried to take seriously the all-important term Lebhaft (vivacious, animated) with which Schumann tagged three-quarters of the symphony. But an unyielding tempo has its drawbacks, too, especially in the case of Schumann who is well-known for his obsessive rhythmic patterns, not to mention his fragrant melodies. In addition, no-one can ignore the existence of two versions of the score, one from 1841 (located and published by Brahms) and one from 1851 (with reworked, heavier orchestration), a fact that invites interpreters to manage the balance of forces, and to consider carefully the detailed shaping of the all-important slow introduction. These aspects seemed rather to elude the executants.
Just as daring encores by visiting soloists have been opening windows onto types of contemporary music seldom presented in these parts (like the Lamentatio), so in a different way have several of the ‘curtain-raisers’ served to refresh the orchestra’s repertoire with out-of-the-way works or under-represented composers. Dvořák’s Mein Heim (given in Nov 2023) and his Czech Suite (coming on 21st March) are good examples of the former. As for the latter, Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was the only music of his played in more than a year’s concerts.
Alongside his familiar (because oft-repeated) compositions, Mendelssohn’s Fair Melusine Overture was an opener of relative obscurity. The performance was far from seamless; it must be said that the gurgling water motif that is passed rapidly around the orchestra created significant difficulties at the outset, and was never a match for the melodramatic passages which sounded far more convincing. Still, hats off to whoever thought to programme this fine piece.
NB: To link direct to the KZNPO website, click on
the advert at the top right hand of this page.
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