Concertgebouworkest in the Alte Oper: Also for non-socialist ears
Still like a miracle are the jam-packed concerts, which occasionally happen again, at least with particularly prominent guests. The Concertgebouworkest from Amsterdam performed in the Alte Oper Frankfurt, Paavo Järvi conducted, Lisa Batiashvili was the soloist in Ludwig van Beethoven's Violin Concerto.
Järvi put the brakes on it, without the high-spirited energy that often prevails here and is also obvious. Instead, Batiashvili with her sparkling playing and the orchestra, which accompanies her by no means reticently, moved gropingly through the music. A thoughtful, but also dewy approach to the insanely familiar work. The rarely used cadenzas by Alfred Schnittke, composed in 1978 – Batiashvili had sheet music for them – went well with this, a gripping, serious and sinister experience. Schnittke takes up and attacks the musical material, digresses further and further, incorporates many quotations that one does not recognize and at most perceives how something different, new, is pushing in.
This sharply counteracts – and is also brilliantly reproduced by the soloist – the peaceful Sunday concert mood that will always arise with a Beethoven on the program today. It wasn't always like this, and it's exciting to feel something of that.
As an encore, Batiashvili chose the sympathetic and here particularly intimate variant of a tiny chamber concert: For Bach's "Air" from the 3rd orchestral suite, she teamed up with four members of the Concertgebouw.
In the second part, Järvi and the orchestra performed Sergei Prokofiev's 5th symphony without a handbrake or restraint. The work from 1944 is sinister and large-scale, and the dubious requirements of "socialist realism" are also transmitted to non-socialist ears, because populism - no matter how crafty it is - works almost always and everywhere. The ballet composer Prokoyfev can also be heard everywhere.
It's nice when there's a large audience in the hall. Hopefully it doesn't get used to clapping after every movement, no matter how brilliantly it ends.
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