Music review: Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s Eternal
Poetically attuned like few other pianists, Pavel Kolesnikov opened up a box of magic tricks as he and the ASO made Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto sound freshly different and convincing.
Two more dissimilar musicians would be hard to imagine. The slightly built, ethereal Russian pianist, Pavel Kolesnikov, is a purveyor of delicacy, while American conductor Tito Muñoz, from New York City, is a down-to-earth people’s man, a robust communicator, and keen to please.
The two have never met before and are on Australia soil to play Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. Talk about chalk and cheese: Kolesnikov and Muñoz were hardly made to share the stage together, but in their odd way they were the perfect match – tellingly so in the concerto’s middle movement where, metaphorically, the poet tames the furies, phrase by soothing phrase.
We can rightly start with what that moment was like, for this was the epicentre of the ASO’s ‘Eternal’ concert. Tersely the orchestra announced itself, only to be answered with infinitely soothing calmness from Kolesnikov. His gently pleading tone through each interjection quelled the orchestra by stages until it was reduced to a whisper: at which point he opened into beautiful rhapsodic melody, as if having achieved victory.
It felt like two egos had met and that one had won out over the other. Which is precisely what Beethoven intends: his innovation in Piano Concerto No. 4 is to present the solo instrument not in it usual capacity for bravura display but as a troubadour, as it were, who wins attention by subtle persuasion.
Kolesnikov is a master at this type of artistry. He has a ton of technique, but one hardly notices that when he plays.
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He spread out the very first chord of this concerto as widely as a harpist might, articulating its repeating chords warmly but crisply, and scaling the apex of its melody with speedy delicacy. ‘See if you can match that’, he was saying to the orchestra, in effect. The famous beginning to the Fourth Piano Concerto, with just six bars from the piano followed by ten times as many bars from the orchestra, sets up a unique imbalance whereby the pianist has to win out purely through the magic of their playing.
This is indeed how it was. Muñoz was surprisingly low-key in that long orchestral exposition, restraining all dynamics and energy. Most conductors let the orchestra play out more freely, but the ASO was playing with a ‘contained vitality’, holding back in deference.
Then the young Russian opened his box of magic. He executed each melody, each phrase, with an original kind of finesse born of flight and movement. In place of metrical observance in a predicable sense, he seemed to escape time altogether. His playing seemed to effloresce and shimmer, like skimming through foam on the crest of a wave.
His restrained but intense interpretation, so deftly finessed and florid, sounded unfamiliar for Beethoven, but its beauty was undeniable. You know something is genuinely innovative when artists make the usual way of doing things look ‘old school’. Here, pianist and conductor were doing just that: they were finding a persuasive new answer.
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There was a lot else to love about this concert. Rarely has a contemporary work sounded as equal a companion among established classics as Anna Clyne’s This Midnight Hour. Immediately it is listenable and likeable. Cinematic in style and episodic in structure, it seems to describe a night-time dreamscape of variegated mood from sensuous to dramatic. How one might read it story-wise is up to one’s own imagination. But the overriding thing about This Midnight Hour is how extremely well it is written. Clyne employs recognisable orchestral gestures throughout and discloses its purposes as it happens, which is to say it needs no deciphering. This 2015 work puts her in the front league. It is that good.
All the time one could admire Muñoz. He has a physicality, a way of sculpting energy that ripples from his core and out of his hands and fingers. It looks as if he is going to unleash at any moment, but he is not that sort of conductor.
In Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet: Fantasy Overture, that most hyper-impassioned score, the trajectory can become just a piling up of sound towards a tumultuous climax. However, there was nothing so banal or obvious under Muñoz. He gave each moment its full breathing shape and grace; all was in balance, all was artistry. Ever the brilliant orchestrator, Tchaikovsky tests the strings with frisky octave work in the strings before the big theme comes, and the ASO got it nicely right.
With its gargantuan scoring, it is always a thrill to hear Respighi’s Pines of Rome live. It sure was thrilling this time. This is of course no Hollywood score; instead, it’s an evocation of an ancient Roman past that is at once poetic and monumental. Respighi’s harmonies are incredibly sensual, and his orchestration is laced with exoticism. Much of his tone poem is in fact not loud at all but on the border between sound and silence: the second movement’s depiction of Rome’s catacombs swirls with mystery, and the distant marching of a military garrison in the final movement, ‘The Pines of the Appian Way’, begins so imperceptibly that it appears to take form in the mist.
The work’s colour and texture were expertly handled, as well as the mighty scale of its final crescendo, which is almost without parallel in orchestral literature.
Muñoz is a really wonderful conductor. He brings out the best in the ASO, and we should have him back.
This is a review of ASO’s Eternal concert on 14 February at the Adelaide Town Hall. Next in its Symphony Series is Devotion on 4-5 April.