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Ongaku no Tomo September 2011
Japan Century Symphony Orchestra (162nd subscription concert)
A very unique programme featuring Beethoven's Symphony No. 2 in D major
(Op. 36), which although does not quite rival that of the Eroica, is still a
very
substantial masterpiece, as the performance on this day more than amply demonstrated.
The musical interpretations using a hard timpani mallet and restrained vibrato
of the stringed instruments clearly showed an awareness of the performance ways
of the period, hence the lucidity of the overall sound with a rich and solid
bass supporting the full-bodied sound. Joseph WOLFE, who conducted with a torrent
of passion but without destroying form, starkly brought forth a well-modulated
structural outline envisaged by Beethoven as well as an abundance of emotion
with orthodox candour. The orchestra capably responded to Wolfeís demands
and with a densely rich sound and ensemble, the result was a very persuasive
performance.
The first half featured solo performances of works by Toru Takemitsu and Mozart
by members of the orchestra. The crisp technique and solid musicality of the
soloists (the performance by concertmaster Tatsunobu GOTO being particularly
outstanding) gave a glimpse into the fundamentally high calibre of this orchestra.
And, being an orchestra that can demonstrate a truly fulfilling strength of performance
with the right conductor, it could be said that the selection of its conductor
is the key to its future, especially after becoming a financially self-support
organization..
June 9, 2011, The Symphony Hall
(Takayoshi NAKAMURA)
Ongaku no Tomo September
2011
Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra (718th subscription concert)
(excerpt)
In English composer W. Alwyn's 'Autumn
legend' for cor anglais and string orchestra, a rare gem replete with romantic
lyricism with a fascinating poetic expression
in Fusako NAMPO's solo
performance, conductor Wolfe succeeded in subtly drawing out the quintessential
English lyric beauty from the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony
Orchestra in a solid and lovely performance. Meanwhile, though Sibelius Symphony
No. 7 is quite frankly a symphonic work with a peculiar concept as the originality
of the orchestration stands out, the subtlety of the structure and form is
clearly understood, and Wolfe vividly brings forth the best part of the work
with mellowness.
Such a very persuasive performance was a nice windfall.
June 15, 2011, Suntory Hall
(Hiromi SAITO)
Sapporo Symphony Orchestra
The 525th subscription concert
January 29 & 30, 2010
Sapporo Kitara Concert Hall
by Takao Nakamura
Wolfe's Tact Responds To The Audience's Expectation
The Sapporo Symphony Orchestra invited Joseph Wolfe to the podium of their 525th
subscription concert. His father is the prominent conductor Sir Colin Davis,
but he does not share his father's sir name to avoid possible influence that
this connection may suggest to people whom he meets.
The program opened with Berlioz's Le Corsaire Overture. It is an iconic work
of the composer, who was renowned as a master of orchestration, characterized
by the hurtling strings as well as the winds and percussions briskly beating
out the rhythms. I found Wolfe's wisdom in the choice of this work as the opening
piece. The fast passage at the beginning was refreshing, and it was followed
by the graceful theme in the smooth performance. The orchestra skillfully described
the charm of this work with vivid performance.
The second piece of the program was Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. The soloist
was a young Korean violinist, Shin Hyun-Su, who substituted for Viviane Hagner
due to her sudden cancellation. So appropriate to her slender appearance on the
stage was the slim sound she created with her instrument. Her performance was
abundant in young woman's sensibility, and it enchanted the audience.
The program concluded with Sibelius's Symphony No. 2. The United Kingdom has
produced a series of conductors who are talented in performing works by Sibelius,
and Sir Colin Davis is one of them. The audience's expectation from his son was
naturally immense, and he responded with a performance that was dynamic, yet
minute, and solid, yet vivid. Contrary to a performance that unnecessarily emphasizes
the popularity of the work, his interpretation faithfully reproduced the composer's
intentions embedded in the score. I was deeply impressed by his attitude toward
music making. I reckon, however, that it takes an exceptionally high spirituality
for Wolfe to uphold this attitude, especially considering his young age.
Accolades should be given to the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra for responding to
the conductor with superb performances. This concert proved that only excellent
conductors could make the orchestra perform with their full abilities.
Hokkaido Shimbun Newspaper, February 10, 2010
Ongaku
no Tomo, March 2010
Sapporo Symphony Orchestra
525th subscription concert
January 29, 2010
Sapporo Concert Hall
by Tomohiko Hondo
Joseph Wolfe guest-conducted the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra for its subscription
concert. The soloist for Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto was a young Korean violinist,
Shin Hyun-Su, who substituted for Viviane Hagner.
The program opened with Berlioz's Le Corsaire Overture. Wolfe's talent was
already obvious from this piece. The masculine sound was full of bursting vitality.
I missed Hagner's performance. However, Shin's superb performance compensated
the misfortune. With her slim, but penetrating sound as well as finely-honed
senses, she skillfully treated Mendelssohn. In the first and third movements,
her brisk play was apt to lose contact with the orchestra. However, her exceptional
talent was revealed in the highly concentrated musical sense of phrasing.
The second half of the program was Sibelius Symphony No. 2. Wolfe eliminated
romantic sentiment from the second movement with exceptional persuasion. Also,
he performed the introduction to the first theme of the finale free from any
sort of tenaciousness. Some may have felt lack of punch. But, I was overwhelmed
by the power, which gushed out of the sound.
The soloist and the conductor should be credited for the success of the concert.
Joseph
Wolfe , Conductor
Century Orchestra Osaka 144th subscription concert
September 10, 2009
The Symphony Hall, Osaka
The Century Orchestra Osaka's 144th subscription concert was conducted
by Joseph Wolfe, a rising conductor from England.
The evening's program opened with Elgar Serenade op.20 and Sospiri,
which were followed by Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 with the pianist
Andre Watts and Haydn Symphony No. 104 "London".
Each work was treated by the performance that effectively exhibited its characteristics.
In particular, Elgar's works revealed their sensibility in the serene string
performance.
The second movement of the serenade was abundant in spontaneous singing. Those
were the expressions faithfully followed the sense commonly shared among British
people.
In the performance of Sospiri, legato was particularly beautiful, and subtle
portamento created swaying sense of beauty.
In the Beethoven piano concerto, strings smoothly flowed. Watts' piano performance
had well-received placid lyricism. His colorful timbre lacked in depth. However,
the cadenza was powerful, creating exquisite contrast with the orchestra in the
second movement. In the third movement, Watts and the orchestra fully revealed
their respective power.
The performance of Haydn was also full of energy. The exposition was repeated,
giving a strong impression of period performance. The distinctive solid effect
was this conductor's characteristic. Sharp rhythm and clear articulation - another
lively, sophisticated rendition.
Tadao Koishi, Ongaku no Tomo, November 2009
Little,
RTÉ NSO / Wolfe
National Concert
Hall, Dublin
Mozart - Don Giovanni Overture.
Elgar - Violin Concerto
Sibelius - Symphony No 1
From the opening bars of a focused account of Mozart's Don Giovanni Overture
, it was evident that rising British conductor Joseph Wolfe can aim for
high intensity and control it. That was one of the characteristics of
Sibelius's Symphony No 1, which closed the concert.
This gripping performance had plenty of rhythmic drive, and Wolfe's way
of creating long-term momentum was successful.
Intensity was of the visceral kind - strong on extremities of volume
and tempo, but with little fine grading in the middle ground. Nor was
the sound particularly disciplined in orchestral balance.
Nevertheless, such strong and committed playing thoroughly deserved the
warm applause.
Despite that impressive conclusion, the performance that will linger
in my memory came before the interval, and not only because of Tasmin
Little's consummate playing of the solo part in Elgar's Violin Concerto.
She just played it, with little obvious striving; and she never milked
it for impact. Everything seemed just to happen; and it was especially
remarkable that a work famous for being, in the composerﾕs words, "awfully
emotional, too emotional," was captured so deeply via playing that was
utterly unsentimental.
It was hard to pinpoint exactly how the dynamics of the relationship
between soloist, conductor and orchestra were working, for everything
seemed to work as one. The complexity of Elgar's orchestral scoring was
subtly handled, with everyone listening as much as they were reading.
The way Elgar knits the solo part into the orchestral textures came across
beautifully. This was a rarity - a performance whose completeness was
something to treasure because, with any orchestra, conductor or soloist,
such transcendence can never be commonplace.
Martin Adams
The Irish Times
28th
September '07
London Philharmonic Orchestra
March 2007
The confidence of youth
Paul Driver applauds three passionate performances at the podium
The young conductor Daniel Harding, like the composer Thomas Adès, is the subject of "portrait" concerts at the Barbican, a series mounted by the London Symphony Orchestra and opening with a spectacular account of Mahler's Seventh Symphony. Strictly speaking, the start was a suite of dances from Rameau's opera Hippolyte et Aricie, a charmingly inconsequential, crisply articulated baroque upbeat to Mahler's monumental proto-modernist essay.
Harding was evidently at home in both idioms, but one soon forgot the Rameau. The funereal tread and baleful tenor horn solo of the symphony's beginning - a sonic combination that seems to claw one - announced a visionary serious-ness that was sustained for some 80 minutes with unwavering insight. Harding's super-confidence made for a super-clarity entirely appropriate to this score. The orchestra played with fierce immediacy, but a sort of metallic brilliance; one, though, that was full of dark undertones. The five disparate movements were hammered into a single argument. The performance had the unanswerable assertiveness that defines true style.
A few days earlier, I'd heard a comparably masterful performance of a Mahler symphony - his Ninth - given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and its young chief conductor, Ilan Volkov, at City Halls, in Glasgow. The withering force of the burlesque third movement became ever more implacable, but by the end of the death-struck, increasingly fragmentary finale, we were decidedly crossing to "the other side". Aptly, the earlier part of the programme had been the premiere of a work, Body Mandala, by that most spiritualist and Buddhist of contemporary composers, Jonathan Harvey.
To call this piece an "evocation" of the purification rituals that Harvey has witnessed in Tibetan monasteries is almost a misnomer, for it seems to want to be the thing itself. To this end, it throws up some strange sounds. A closely entwined oboe quartet stands for the raucous four-note Tibetan oboe that Harvey mentions, and we hear unearthly improvisings by Tibetan-cymbal players. The opening pulsation of low brass A flats has a rough insistency that dominates the piece. Defying such rootedness are unmetred wood-wind roulades that whizz off the page and into space. In its alliance of joyous religiosity and biting orchestral inventiveness, Body Mandala reminds me of such Stockhausen pieces as his 1974 Inori "adorations for one or two soloists and orchestra". But Harvey has long flown free of that decisive influence. His bright new score could not be by anyone else, and Volkov did it proud.
A third young conductor came my way. Joseph Wolfe appeared with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Queen Elizabeth Hall in a solid programme of works by Schubert, Saint-Saëns and Sibelius. Wolfe is a son of Colin Davis (Volkov's late father was the pianist of the Israel Piano Trio), but such conducting successions are not uncommon: one thinks of the Kleibers, the Jansonses, the Jarvis. The conductor to whom Wolfe bears a striking physical resemblance, however, is Gustav Mahler. He came across as a sympathetic figure, warmly impassioned and well prepared. He had his scores in front of him, but, in Schubert's Symphony No 8 and Sibelius's No 1, rarely looked at them. His reading of the first had a powerful, tragic tautness; the second was a more raw, less disciplined affair. Between the items came a captivating account of the first, in A minor, of Saint-Saëns's two cello concertos, with an amazingly skilful soloist in Pieter Wispelwey. It was a programme all in a minor key.
Sunday Times
1st April 2007
The up and coming conductor, Joseph Wolfe, oversaw this concert of works that spread from the dawn of the Romantic movement in music to near its illustrious close taking in a concerto from the very middle of this period in the history of music.
Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony - he only completed the first two movements - heralds a new sense of feeling in music that leaves behind the strictness of classical sonata form for a broader view of musical expression. The gift of any conductor in this particular work is to marry its marriage of classical design with romantic content. Furthermore any interpretation should be judged on proclaiming the genius of Schubert for expressing everything from anxiety to valediction. Very few composers of any period possess such diversity in their creativity.
The 'Unfinished' Symphony has become, unfortunately, aural wallpaper, so popular, and so frequently is it heard. It gives special delight, therefore, to report pleasure (hardly the appropriate word on hearing this apex of Schubertian expression) from Joseph Wolfe's subtle and absorbing interpretation that was here beautifully played. The quiet opening on double basses gave way to a nervously inclined statement on violins that launched the wide-ranging themes of the first movement. Sometimes fierce, sometimes calm, all sides of Schubert's character were on display and portrayed with the right sense of balance and integrity.
Likewise the second movement, Andante con moto, was true to its title and never lingered. Wolfe found a range of expression from his judicious choice of tempos that lifted the spirits and reinforced the essential nature of well-being in the music. It was a fine performance.
Saint-Saëns's First Cello Concerto, written in 1873, is a good example of the composer's formal innovations in musical structure. Compressing material normally in three movements into one convincing whole displays a mental agility alongside his romantic sensibility. Commentators often proclaim a lack of depth in this French composer's output but, even supposing this to be true, he more than compensated for this 'sin' by his formal experimentation, none more so than in this popular concerto.
Played with the right spirit of romanticism, the Dutch cellist, Pieter Wispelwey, propelled the start of the first movement with true ardour. Never loosing his
intonation in the scurrying scale passages he balanced the various moods with elegance and taste. The orchestra was well balanced by Wolfe who allowed the soloist full reign in displaying tonal lustre.
After the interval came Sibelius's First Symphony, a work that ends a decade of his nationalist- and often literary-inspired music with this attempt at abstract musical expression. In fact the symphony is Sibelius's response to Finnish critics who demanded evidence of his ability to write a non-programmatic symphonic work. Sibelius was the Finnish musical hero of the moment as the nineteenth-century drew to its close and would have regarded the challenge for writing such a work with a mixture of trepidation and relish. In fact what was meant to be the first of its kind in Finnish musical history was usurped by a much younger Finn, Ernst Mielck, a real musical prodigy who wrote an abstract symphony two years before Sibelius composed his. Mielck's work is indebted to German romanticism as expected from a pupil of Max Bruch. Sibelius's work is much more individual though it does sound a lot like Tchaikovsky in places. However the very opening for solo clarinet is striking for setting the tone of the entire work. It also serves as a motto theme that is bought back at the beginning of the finale. It is somewhat surprising to learn this was an afterthought, though a truly inspired one, that appeared a year later when Sibelius revised the work after its premiere in 1899.
What was remarkable about the performance under Wolfe was how the indebtedness to Tchaikovsky was played down in favour of a true Sibelian sonority even in the often-mushy slow movement. Wolfe accentuated the varying woodwind themes above the string mêlée, which produced a true freshness to the fabric of the work. Each movement had an authentic momentum that gave the whole piece a semblance of formal unity rare in most interpretations. The coda in the finale was a true summing up of the emotional roller coaster heard before. Sibelius subsequently produced many more truly idiosyncratic masterpieces but none was to reveal a romantic coherence that lies at the heart of his First Symphony. It is to Wolfe and the LPO's credit that this character was bought to the fore in this wonderful performance.
Reviewed by: Edward Clark
www.classicalsource.com
The Dome Concert Hall, Brighton
Young British conductor Joseph Wolfe produced some warm, rich and exciting music at his Brighton debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
He strode to the platform, raised his baton, and began with a magnificent reading of Franz Schubert's Unfinished 8th Symphony.
Wolfe swayed, leapt and jumped around, injecting great fire and urgent playing of quite exquisite music.
Although there may be no great depths in a Saint-Saens cello concerto, Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey certainly produced some fast fireworks in his account of the second Cello Concerto.
To end, Wolfe got yet another magnificent sound from the orchestra in a passionate performance of Sibelius' First Symphony.
It was an epic account that must make him a future star.
Mike Howard
The Argus - Brighton
22nd March 2007
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