Abendzeitung
27 January 2024
Michael Bastian Weiß
Fantastic, living objects of all possible shapes and colours float through the space, dancing, chasing each other, flashing up in the most diverse places. They are invisible, only audible, and yet so vividly tangible that you feel you can touch them. New music? No: the Symphony No. 1 in G minor by Peter Tchaikovsky, nicknamed "Winter Dreams" - when the Estonian Festival Orchestra plays it. And Paavo Järvi conducts.
Founded by Järvi in 2011, the young orchestra brings together the best Estonians as well as musicians from other countries. From the phenomenally clean, contoured strings alone, you realise in the first few seconds that this is not just a good performance, but one that has been carefully rehearsed. Järvi does not rely solely on precision, but also fans out an infinite palette of different types of strokes, lively, sweeping, powerfully compact. He extracts the maximum effect from the interplay between the opposing 1st and 2nd violins through hearty accents. The woodwinds stand out from each other, the brass with its proud horn section appears à point, the percussion dosed with the gold scale, as is rarely heard.
Because everyone pulls together, Paavo Järvi is able to push the extremes incredibly far apart, mystical murmurs in slow motion are cut hard against passages at ludicrous speed, in between which the music breaks off again and again in a mysterious way.
The Isarphilharmonie's otherwise irritating sound absorption is quite out of place here. Paavo Järvi, who also conducts at the highest technical level, discovers the modernity of an alleged Romantic; the Estonians give a breakneck encore with the "Vallflickans Dans" from the ballet pantomime "Bergakungen" by Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén. Against such stringency, Antonín Dvorák's Violoncello Concerto in B minor is even less focussed and more episodic than usual. It's a good thing that Sol Gabetta grabs the solo part by the scruff of the neck from the very first second of her entry and energetically drives the digressions forward with her spicy cello tone.
She can ignite a melody line with her bow like no other and keep it glowing like a fuse. Sol Gabetta should definitely make the stage floor vibrate again soon with the Estonian Festival Orchestra. There are some marvellous works by Tchaikovsky, for example, for precisely this instrumentation.
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