CONCERT REVIEW: PROMS 2003
Proms Royal Albert Hall
By David Murray
Financial Times, London (UK), August 5, 2003
At Friday's Prom, the Estonian conductor Paavo Jarvi led the BBC Philharmonic in his compatriot Erkki-Sven Tuur's remarkable violin concerto. It is a hefty piece, more than half an hour long, but the redoubtable Dutch soloist Isabelle van Keulen, who premiered it in 1999, looked serenely poised throughout its strenuous byways.
Not only the violin part, which begins with frantic sawing of arpeggios, but the whole score sounds athletic and muscularly confident. There's little conventional "development"; rather, in the lengthy first movement, the soloist continually flings out musical ideas which the orchestra seizes upon and alters, feeding them back to her transformed.
The second begins in microtonal bass gloom, soon lifted by lyrical flights from the violin, high and bright; the brief final movement unites soloist and orchestra in a race home. It was an afterthought, apparently, and sounds like filling a prescription, without any new ideas. But the whole piece is very striking, and often exciting. Too much has been made, I think, of Tuur's "synthesising" of tonality and atonality, minimalism, serialism and what-have-you; this is simply a composer with his own generous idiom, happy to borrow effects and devices from many sources. He began as a rock musician, and traces of that often surface in his music.
Jarvi and the BBC Philharmonic had begun with Mussorgsky's A Night on Bare Mountain: a notably musical reading, but the result was a bit tame and tidy. Not, surely, what Mussorgsky had in mind! After the interval, however, we had a most searching and thoughtful Prokofiev 6th: moving despair, weariness, a great sense of loss, in no wise contradicted by the pretend-light-hearted finale. It was a performance of real distinction.
By David Murray
Financial Times, London (UK), August 5, 2003
At Friday's Prom, the Estonian conductor Paavo Jarvi led the BBC Philharmonic in his compatriot Erkki-Sven Tuur's remarkable violin concerto. It is a hefty piece, more than half an hour long, but the redoubtable Dutch soloist Isabelle van Keulen, who premiered it in 1999, looked serenely poised throughout its strenuous byways.
Not only the violin part, which begins with frantic sawing of arpeggios, but the whole score sounds athletic and muscularly confident. There's little conventional "development"; rather, in the lengthy first movement, the soloist continually flings out musical ideas which the orchestra seizes upon and alters, feeding them back to her transformed.
The second begins in microtonal bass gloom, soon lifted by lyrical flights from the violin, high and bright; the brief final movement unites soloist and orchestra in a race home. It was an afterthought, apparently, and sounds like filling a prescription, without any new ideas. But the whole piece is very striking, and often exciting. Too much has been made, I think, of Tuur's "synthesising" of tonality and atonality, minimalism, serialism and what-have-you; this is simply a composer with his own generous idiom, happy to borrow effects and devices from many sources. He began as a rock musician, and traces of that often surface in his music.
Jarvi and the BBC Philharmonic had begun with Mussorgsky's A Night on Bare Mountain: a notably musical reading, but the result was a bit tame and tidy. Not, surely, what Mussorgsky had in mind! After the interval, however, we had a most searching and thoughtful Prokofiev 6th: moving despair, weariness, a great sense of loss, in no wise contradicted by the pretend-light-hearted finale. It was a performance of real distinction.
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