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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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