English Language Translation of the Berlin Concert with Mini-Explosion!
Many thanks go out to my good friend and translator extraordinaire, Werner Richter in Vienna for taking time out of his busy schedule to keep me happy with this entertaining English version of the Berliner Morgenpost's review of Paavo's concert of February 5. Werner, who is more frequently found translating works of literary fiction from English into German and who served as the longtime German translator for the well-known American author T. Coraghessan (T.C.) Boyle, clearly got a kick out of this review. As he wrote in his e-mail to me: "...I guess the journalists also have in mind the famous saying of Mr. Neven DuMont, another German tabloid czar, "Kultur ist, wenn Karajan der Kronleuchter auf den Kopf fällt" ("Culture, i.e. a cultural event worth writing up in our paper, is when Karajan gets the [concert hall] chandelier dropped down on his head.").
Paavo Jervis Concert with Miniature Explosion
Berliner Morgenpost, 2/7/05
"They sure have crazy ideas, those modern composers. Like, right after the brass section start their tooting their horns and the whole orchestra clashes and crashes, and right in the middle of a polyphonic string canon, they even arrange for a little explosion. However, the bang had not at all been planned for by Erkki-Sven Tüür for his orchestral composition Zeitraum (1992).
"What happened was that one of the rostrum lights blew its bulb and shed some dust downwards. Paavo Jervi only once scowled up at the little cloud of smoke on the concert hall ceiling and immediately found his way back into the once harshly colliding instrumental clusters, then softly gliding moods of this remarkable piece of music.
"The German Symphony Orchestra with him [was] disciplined and conformistic. Although this explicitly uncomfortable concert programme was probably meant as a deliberate contrast to that Saturday afternoon’s carnival atmosphere. The ear-blasting piece by Tüür complete with illumination bang was followed by Dmitriy Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto in E-flat. Tanja Tetzlaff meandered nonchalantly through the rather mechanistic first movement with a sonorous, drawn-out expressivo. Next was a series of delicate and radiant lyrisms, instantaneously changing over into the third movement that was treated as a solo cadenza losing itself in extensive, fine cello meditations. For the sparkling muscularity of the final movement, La Tetzlaff once more pulled all the strings, as it were – and her strings have quite a spectrum. Even after the intermission, Paavo Jervi never ceased to put his spell on the audience, serving Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra as an impressive freestyle sample.
Paavo Jervis Concert with Miniature Explosion
Berliner Morgenpost, 2/7/05
"They sure have crazy ideas, those modern composers. Like, right after the brass section start their tooting their horns and the whole orchestra clashes and crashes, and right in the middle of a polyphonic string canon, they even arrange for a little explosion. However, the bang had not at all been planned for by Erkki-Sven Tüür for his orchestral composition Zeitraum (1992).
"What happened was that one of the rostrum lights blew its bulb and shed some dust downwards. Paavo Jervi only once scowled up at the little cloud of smoke on the concert hall ceiling and immediately found his way back into the once harshly colliding instrumental clusters, then softly gliding moods of this remarkable piece of music.
"The German Symphony Orchestra with him [was] disciplined and conformistic. Although this explicitly uncomfortable concert programme was probably meant as a deliberate contrast to that Saturday afternoon’s carnival atmosphere. The ear-blasting piece by Tüür complete with illumination bang was followed by Dmitriy Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto in E-flat. Tanja Tetzlaff meandered nonchalantly through the rather mechanistic first movement with a sonorous, drawn-out expressivo. Next was a series of delicate and radiant lyrisms, instantaneously changing over into the third movement that was treated as a solo cadenza losing itself in extensive, fine cello meditations. For the sparkling muscularity of the final movement, La Tetzlaff once more pulled all the strings, as it were – and her strings have quite a spectrum. Even after the intermission, Paavo Jervi never ceased to put his spell on the audience, serving Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra as an impressive freestyle sample.
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