Sunday, October 30, 2016

Gergiev / Mariinsky's Wagner: Das Rheingold in Taipei on 2016/10/30

Time: 2016/10/30 (Sunday), 19:00-22:00 (approximately)
Venue: National Concert Hall, Taipei
Performers: 
Valery Gergiev (conductor),
Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra
Mariinsky Theatre Soloists
Wotan: Yuri Vorobiev
Fricka: Anna Kiknadze
Freia: Oxana Shilova
Erda: Zlata Bulycheva
Loge: Mikhail Vekua
Donner: Ilya Bannik
Froh: Yevgeny Akhmedov
Alberich: Vladislav Sulimsky
Mime: Andrei Popov
Fasolt: Vadim Kravets
Fafner: Mikhail Petrenko
Woglinde: Zhanna Dombrovskaya
Wellgunde: Yulia Matochkina
Flosshilde: Ekaterina Sergeeva

Program:
Das Rheingold (premiered at the National Theatre Munich on 22 September 1869) by
Richard Wagner (22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883)
Comparisons:
Wilhelm FurtwänglerOrchestra della RAI Roma1953
Joseph KeilberthOrchester der Bayreuther Festspiele1955
Daniel BarenboimOrchester der Bayreuther Festspiele1991-2Review

 Thoughts:
Gergiev is well known as a very talented, but also volatile conductor. His performance can be unpredictable. I have therefore came to this Das Rheingold (concert form), and the preceding Matinée on the same day, both with excitement and trepidation. So, how was this Das Rheingold?

 Without the star cast in Gergiev's recording, one certainly did not expect the same high level of performance. Nevertheless, the "Mariinsky Soloists" consisted of competent to very good singers who were able to deliver their lines with enough precision and confidence to be enjoyable. Especially good was Vladislav Sulimsky's Alberich. In terms of idiomatic Wagner, this orchestra was no Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele. However, most of the drama, excitement and forward momentum were there. The brass' occasional wrong notes were mostly forgivable. Gergiev on the helm was pretty good, although towards the ends he seemed a bit exhausted. (Who wouldn't, after more than 2 hour's concert in the afternoon, and all the travels?)

 In the end, this was definitely a worthwhile concert. Ping was extremely impressed by the colorful orchestral sound and claimed that she would have gone to the entire ring  cycles in concert form if Gergiev was to offer them. Not a trivial compliment from Ping when it comes any activity which does not permit use of washroom for more than four hours. Talking about the overactive bladders -- starting about an hour into the opera until the end, some audience members had to leave their seats in the middle of the 3-hour performance, I was told, mostly due to the urge of full bladders.
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Valery Gergiev / Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra Taipei Concert on 2016/10/30

Time: 2016/10/30 (Sunday), 14:00-16:00 (approximately)
Venue: National Concert Hall, Taipei
Performers: 
Valery Gergiev (conductor), Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra
Andrei Ionuț Ioniță (cello)

Program: (in the order of performance)

Comparisons:
musicsamples (online)performers
RossiniWilliam Tell OvertureLeonard Bernstein conducts New York PO
ShostakovichCello Concerto No. 1Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; LSO, Seiji Ozawa, conductor
TchaikovskySymphony No. 5Evgeny Mravinsky conducts Leningrad PO

Encores:

Thoughts:
What an amazing talent Andrei Ioniță is! A richly deserving gold medalist of the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition (Cello), Ioniță chose to play his prize-winning (final-round) piece of Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1, and did not disappoint. He not only navigated fiendishly difficult fast passagework and double stops with surprising confidence and skill, but also showed he could spin slow melodies with ease. In the encore, he showed his sense of pulse and style in the prelude from Bach's first cello suite in G. I was very much in awe of this 22-year-old cellist, who very much reminded me of young Mischa Maisky, the 6th-prize winner of the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition, even though their training (Germany vs. Soviet) and nationality (Romannian vs. Latvia/Israil) are very different. (Personally, I much prefer the young Maisky than the more mature one, but that is digression.)

 The concert opened with Rossini's crowd-pleasing William Tell Overture. After just a few bars, we knew immediately what Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra could do with the theatrical works. (The only minor complaint was the less-than-stellar performance by the lead flautist.) The orchestra's affinity with the Russian work was in full display with concluding piece of the e minor symphony by Tchaikovsky (No. 5), which was premiered in 1888 by this very orchestra in Tsar Alexander III's St. Petersburg. Gergiev's subtle tempo variations and dynamics changes sounded totally idiomatic, and the marvelous orchestra responded with flair.  The finale culminated in a subtle accelerando in the closing bars of the coda, and the audience bursted into thundering applause.

 For the encore, Gergiev played the Prelude to Lohengrin. It was a really good performance, and a showcase of the varieties of works the orchestra and the conductor were capable of. Even if this was indeed not an idiomatic account, in the way that those conducted by Kempe, Sawallisch, Barenboim or Abbado were, it had a refreshingly exotic tone overall and created an interestingly different, and perhaps equally valid, interpretation.
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Thursday, October 27, 2016

András Schiff Piano Recital in Taipei 2016/10/26

Time: 2016/10/26 (Wednesday), 19:30-22:40 (approximately)
Venue: National Concert Hall, Taipei
Performers: András Schiff
Program: (in the order of performance)

Encores:

Thoughts:

 What a wonderful concert!

Sir András Schiff has been my touchstone of Bach performance on piano for many years(*1). What is so special about Schiff's Bach? Besides supple touch and immaculate tone production, which many top pianists share, he revolutionized Bach performance on piano by fusing the Historically-Informed Performance (HIP) practice with the expressive devices belonging exclusively to the modern grand pianos. Combined with uncanny ears and touch, Schiff's Bach performance is truly peerless.

How so? First, Schiff's elucidation of the counterpoint is unrivaled, not even by harpsichordists with rigorous musicological training. The purists will chide me for allowing Bach's solo keyboard music be played on a modern piano. I love harpsichord performances of these works too: from Wanda Landowska to Davitt Moroney and Pierre Hantaï....; they have long inhabited my music shelves and musical life. Many of them are truly wonderful. However, on a good modern grand piano, Bach's n-part counterpoint can have n different tone colors, if played under masterful hands. In terms of this, Schiff is still unsurpassed (IMO).

Second, musicologists, historians and period-instrumentalists have been (re)searching and exploring for decades the "affective ways" to play polyphonic music on harpsichords (clavichords, virginals) by subtle rubato, different articulations, varieties of touch, and rhythmical independence of the parts, partly to offset the lack of the expressive devices only available to the modern grand pianos: the broad range of dynamics and the infinite varieties of tone color shadings. What Schiff pioneered is to fuse these two, and the result is a unique combination of countrapuntal clarity and mesmerizing beauty.

Enough of my rambling. Now, for this concert, the opening piece was the Italian Concerto in F. To my surprise, Schiff started the piece with slightly rushed tempo, compared with his better-timed recorded performance, and Schiff's golden tone was not completely there in the first few bars. Fortunately, as it moved to the second movement (in d minor), he was back to good form. Still, this was not Schiff at his best.

Fortunately, after a long pause, (during which Schiff did not leave the stage,) his magical touch was back in the second piece. I was completely captivated by his French Overture in b from start to finish. Each part was perfectly balanced, each tone perfectly produced and each musical phrase organically born in relation to its predecessor and giving birth to its successor. Every moment of the French Overture performance was a masterclass of exemplary taste!

After the intermission, we are treated with the monumental Goldberg Variations. The mathematical intricacy of the Goldberg has been well documented. There are 30 variations flanked by the aria and aria da capo, 32 in total. The aria itself has 32 bars, divided into 16-bar halves. The variation technique is based on the ground bass, upon which the foundation of the whole structure are based. Ralph Kirkpatrick sketched out the base line as follows.


The tonality is consistently G major, with the exception of g minor in Variations Nos. 15, 21 and 25. Then the 30 variations are divided into 10 groups of three. Each group contains a general character piece (e.g., Baroque dances in Variations 1, 4, etc.), a brilliant virtuoso piece ("arabesque" in Var. 2, 5 etc.) and a strictly polyphonic canon (in Var. 3, 6 etc.). The canons are presented in a sequence of increasing intervals, starting with a canon in unison (Var. 3) and ending in a canon in ninths (Var. 27). The final variation (30), instead of a canon in the tenth, is a quodlibet, combining folk songs with the ground bass.

Schiff observed all repeats, but no repeats were identical. Tasteful ornamentations were added in the repeats, except in the aria da capo, where the ornaments were removed to the "unadorned" form. This created symmetry, as Bach must have intended. Indeed, Schiff's command of the architecture at the smaller scales was as impressive as his concept of the structure of the whole piece. The way he led us from one variation to the next, or paused in anticipation of the upcoming variation, was masterful. His supple touch created buoyant, dazzling and pensive music in turns, with golden and constantly varying tone colors. What a magisterial performance!

After about 75 minutes of sheer delight, in response to the enthusiastic audience, Schiff played Beethoven's entire Piano Sonata in E, No. 30 as the first encore piece.(*2) The audience went wild! He then followed it with the first movement of Mozart's Piano Sonata in C, No. 16, K. 545, Schubert's Impromptu in E-flat, D. 899 (Op. 90) No. 2 and Brahms's Intermezzo in E-flat Major, Op.117 no.1. There you had it, a mini-survey of Austro-German musical heritage in a nutshell.

After the concert, already at 22:45, it was announced that an autograph signing session would take place shortly. Unfortunately, the line was so long that Ping and I had to leave without thanking Sir András in person, even though we had prepared a CD for him to sign.... I was told that the signing lasted until half an hour before midnight. 

 The only drawback, if any, of this recital was the relatively smaller audience, (the hall was about three quarters full,) compared with other recitals I have been. Does Taiwanese audience not know Sir András Schiff well enough? Surely the music critics and piano teachers can do a better job in promoting this recital, can't they? On the flip side, the audience there consisted only "true fans". Almost all stayed past 22:30 to sit through all encores and to thank Sir András with thundering applauses.

Thank you, Sir András, for the wonderful recital, surely among the most memorable in my concert-going experience!


(*1) My family can attest to that, having been listening to him "involuntarily" on CD and DVD for years. Fortunately, they all love Schiff! :)

(*2) The only more "generous" encore I heard of along this line was the famous story of young Rudolf Serkin. At his Berlin debut in 1921 Serkin performed in Adolf Busch's ensemble as the keyboard soloist in the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. At the end of the concert, Busch told Serkin to play an encore to the enthusiastic audience. When Serkin asked Busch what to play, Busch "as a joke" told him to play the Goldberg Variations. "When I finished", Serkin later recalled, "there were only four people left: Adolf Busch, Artur Schnabel, Alfred Einstein and me." Fortunately, though, Serkin did not play repeats, so it lasted only about 45 minutes.
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Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Julia Fischer Violin Recital in Taipei on 2016/10/25

Time: 2016/10/25 (Tuesday), 19:30-21:30 (approximately)
Venue: National Concert Hall, Taipei
Performers: Julia Fischer (violin), Martin Helmchen (piano)

Program: (in the order of performance)

 Comparisons:
musicsamples (online)performers
DvořákComplete Sonatina in G Aron Vacha, violin and Tomas Svoboda, piano
SchubertComplete Violin Sonatina, D408Szymon Goldberg, violin and Radu Lupu, piano
SchubertComplete Violin Sonatina, D384Szymon Goldberg, violin and Radu Lupu, piano
BrahmsViolin Sonata No. 3 in DItzhak Perlman, violin Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano
Encores:

 Thoughts:

Taipei is the last stop of Julia Fischer's Asian Recital Tour with Martin Helmchen. They play Dvorák, Brahms and Schubert at different concert places: the tour starts on October 15 at Tokyo Opera City, then follow Toppan Arts Hall Tokyo, Shanghai Oriental Art Center, Shenzhen Concert Hall, Seoul Arts Center, Hong Kong City Hall and finally Taipei National Concert Hall.

Ms. Fischer, at 33, has been a professor at the Hochschule für Musik in Frankfurt for 10 years. This is my first music hall encounter with Julia Fischer, who has been billed as a young "violin superstar". She was named the Best Newcomer in 2006 BBC Music Magazine Awards and the prestigious The Classic FM Gramophone Awards Artist of the Year in 2007. The frivolous title of superstar suggests that she must be a violin virtuoso, but she is more. Julia Fischer is a great musician.

And this was an great concert. It was exciting to hear a violinist with such impeccable command on her instrument: the bow movement, tone production, and rhythmic precision were just about perfect. Among living violinists, she reminds me of a somewhat rare mix of Christian Tetzlaff, Leila Josefowicz and Hilary Hahn, although during the concert I was thinking more of Arthur Grumiaux for the combination of precision of the left hand and flexible and straight bow movement on the right hand.

Make no mistake, however. This was a concert of duo between a violinist and a pianist, and the audience was lucky to have a worthy pianist in Martin Helmchen.(*) Some pieces emphasize on one instrument and others on the other. It took two real musicians to pull off such a wonderful concert, which had the Brahms as the center-piece (in my opinion). They matched each other's every step in their individual interpretation of this familiar piece. The concert concluded with the hair-raising Presto agitato movement, exemplarily executed and boldly interpreted.

For the encores, Fischer and Helmchen appropriately chose Brahms's Scherzo from the F-A-E sonata, which was originally designed to be a collaborative work between Robert Schumann, his pupil Albert Dietrich and Brahms. For the second encore, Fischer put down the violin and played Brahms's Hungarian Dance No. 5 for piano four hand with Helmchen. We are reminded that Ms. Fischer is billed as a violinist and a pianist.

This was a memorable concert and I have learned a thing or two. More Ms. Fischer, please!

(*) Unfortunately, it is hard for top violinists to find equal partners in pianists for concert tours, since pianists of such stature often prefer to tour as soloists.
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Saturday, October 22, 2016

Ensemble InterContemporain and Matthias Pintscher Concert "Hommage à Boulez" in Taipei on 2016/10/21

Time: 2016/10/21 (Friday), 19:30-22:00 (approximately)
Venue: National Concert Hall, Taipei
Performers: Ensemble InterContemporain, conducted by Matthis Pintscher

Program: (official program notes)
Additional information:
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Chamber Concerto
I. Corrente
II. Calmo, sostenuto
III. Movimento preciso e meccanico
IV. Presto
Composed in 1969-70, this piece helped make the ensemble of soloists a standard line-up for new music, though Ligeti's treatment has had few equals in terms of fantasy and delightfulness. It begins with the instruments moving within a narrow range, sliding in register, until suddenly the whole pitch space is opened up by the arrival of piled octaves. Their pure sound is soon muddied, and wonderful confusion resumes: at one point the wind instruments start to sing a massively amplified folktune. Finally the music explodes into dispersed melody, only to be clamped again. 'My general idea for this movement', Ligeti has remarked, 'was the surface of a stretch of water, where everything takes place below the surface.' The second movement takes a different route through dense chords, jostling movements and strains of melody sounding like echoes of folksong or Romantic music, such as are played by a plaintive trio of horn, oboe d'amore and trombone. After a fortissimo climax, something absolutely inevitable and yet totally unexpected turns up around the corner: a tritone sounding quietly in octaves. From this develops a second part of the movement, which beautifully disintegrates … to be replaced by an extraordinary musical machine, a disconnected chirruping of regular rhythms from different odd ensembles. The presto finale continues the mechanical feeling a little, but the twitterings are now rustlings that develop and echo through clusters, single intervals and arpeggios, and that race around the small orchestra in a perpetuum mobile of great virtuosity. Once again, as in the first and second movements, one way out of the maze appears to be through melody, and a line starts out on the horn, most positive of instruments. But the melody quickly begins to lose its distinctiveness, and the perpetual motion continues until another tritone, like a single light of gathering intensity, begins to shine through the texture and freeze the music, leaving only disjointed echoes.
Notes by Paul Griffiths © 2009

 Comparisons: 

 I have only heard of the "contemporary classics" in the second half of the program:
Brief thoughts: 

This concert was Eensemble InterContemporain's homage to Pierre Boulez, who passed away in January this year, at the age of 90. 

I am no expert on 21st C. music, but Pintscher's performance leans towards emotional effects at the cost of contrapuntal clarity. Compared with recordings by Pierre Boulez/EIC and Reinbert de Leeuw/Schönberg Ensemble/ASKO Ensemble I feared that the second half of the program was given the short end of the stick. Still, this was a thoroughly enjoyable concert, and I got to know four new pieces, all in the first half of the recital. I especially enjoyed Bruno Mantovani's Les Danses interrompues, although Ping liked Pintscher's newly-minted Whirling tissue of light, for piano quite a lot. Les Danses was wonderfully inventive, while Whirling sensual and impressionistic. 

Unfortunately, the only Taiwanese piece 謝宗仁(1981-):《楓之絮語》木管五重奏(2007) (Tsung-Jen Hsieh: Ahorngeflüster, for wind quintet) was a let-down. Surely we do not wish to keep playing compositions by old masters like Hwang-Long Pan. Surely it was a great idea to have younger composers' pieces performed on international stages like this. Alas, in my humble opinion, Hsieh's effort was hardly artful or representative of the current classical-music scene in Taiwan. 

 One really exciting thing about this concert was a relative large and enthusiastic audience with a good mix of ages, from high school and university students (in troves!) to gray-haired seniors. I have been to some concerts halls in the world, and this audience of contemporary music was the very best mix I have seen outside of festival circles. There is great hope for the art music in Taiwan, I think.

 Note: A preconcert 20-minute talk was given by Prof. CHEN Hui-Mei, who spoke more on the historical background than on the actual analysis of the music. I wish there was more of the latter. My interest of the modern music was nurtured by a radio program in the 90's hosted by Hwang-Long Pan, whose eclectic selection and insightful commentary helped me explore this wonderful world.
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Thursday, October 13, 2016

Murray Perahia Piano Recital in Taipei on 2016/10/13

Time: 2016/10/13 (Thursday), 19:30-21:30 (approximately)
Venue: National Concert Hall, Taipei
Performers: Murray Perahia (piano)

 Program:

Comparisons:


Random observations and thoughts:

 Born in New York (Bronx) in 1947 to a Jewish family, Murray Perahia started playing piano at the age of four and later attended Mannes School of Music where he majored in conducting and composition. In 1972, he was the first North American to win first prize at the Leeds Piano Competition, whose prize winners included Radu Lupu (first place) in 1969 and András Schiff (third place) in 1975. (Leeds is held every three years.)

 Perahia's performance has grown in seriousness (some would say severity) in style over the years. There is plenty of lucidity and order, poetry and precision, but the word "seduction" (in the sense of Vladimir Horiwitz) is nowhere to be found. The "severity" was not apparent when he released the complete Mozart piano concerts over the thirteen-year period between 1975 and 1988 to the universal acclaim. (This collection, I think, contains some of the best Mozart performances ever recorded.) At that time, his youthful spontaneity and exuberance were palpable, even though his trademark of poetic lucidity were already there. As Perahia grows in age and maturity, so is his style in seriousness. Some commentators dislike his "intellectualism" and "lack of emotion", calling him unexcited and unexciting. For me, Perahia's polish and poetic playing is so wonderful that I can often overlook any interpretative difference. His interpretation is always well thought out, with strong yet flexible structure. Even his worst critics have to agree that his performance is admirable, if not particularly "thrilling" or convincing. This trait was most apparent in two recitals in the past few years I heard from him.

 The recital opened with two minor key pieces from Haydn and Mozart, followed by Brahms's late, "autumnal", pieces with altering minor and major keys. These short pieces put the second half's monumental Hammerklaiver in the historical perspective. As expected, Perahia played them with his usual sensitivity and touch. 

 This recital's highlight, for me, was Beethoven's Hammerklavier, whose daunting technical demand was well documented. What is equally important about this piece is its revolutionary nature, which was noted but not particularly emphasized in Perahia's analysis. The first movement opens with the sonata form, where the metronome mark is the notoriously impossible half note at 138 ( = 138)! Decades ago, most scholars and pianists seemed to agree that the metronome mark was a mistake, caused either by Beethoven's possibly faulty metronome or deafness. More recently, however, pianists have taken his mark seriously and many have recorded and performed the piece at the written tempo, cf. András Schiff's wonderful lecture. Perahia's approach was sort of middle-of-the-road, leaning towards half note at 130, but did not race his way through. Unfortunately, one too many inarticulate note proved a bit distracting.

 If the "hybrid approach" to the first movement was not an unmitigated success, Perahia was back in full command in the second movement with a crisp and sparkling Scherzo. The Adagio Sostenuto was perhaps the greatest slow movement ever written and Perahia was especially inspired here, mesmerizing and searching in turns. He took the audience by storm with the final movement's breathtaking fugue (with persistent trills). Forget about his critics, this audience was thrilled! 

 At the end of the concert, Perahia, now 69, looked visibly exhausted. He returned to the stage several times to the thundering applauses, but understandably gave no encore. 
Note 1. Perahia performed this same program in Carnegie Hall six months ago, and has toured the world with it. 

Note 2. Perhaps due to the fact that this concert was partially sponsored by the Lawrence S. Ting Memorial Fund, a significant number of the audience members might have gotten their tickets through connections with the Ting foundation. Unfortunately, that made more-than-average sleepers and talkers during the recital. In particular, a couple sitting not far from me were the worst talkers-in-concert ever! (At one point, I almost threw a pen at their faces.) I wish MNA, "Bull's Ear Arts", which managed this program, can in the future put aside the bottom-line consideration for rare occasions such as this and release tickets to the true music lovers. (This concert was sold-out weeks before the event, but there were some vacant seats in the hall).

There was never any more inception than there is now, 
Nor any more youth or age than there is now; 
And will never be any more perfection than there is now, 
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
       Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman
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