In the first of a new column, MICHAEL DERVANlooks back on a week of impressive soloists, guest leaders, dramatic orchestration and a choir at the top of its game
PUT MOZART and Salieri in the one sentence, and you're as likely to be talking about the professional rivalry that's at the heart of Peter Schaffer's play Amadeusand the subsequent film of the play by Milos Forman.
There's an associated myth, that Salieri somehow poisoned Mozart out of professional jealousy. That myth is the subject matter of Mozart and Salieri, a short verse drama Pushkin wrote in 1830, which is also the basis of a two-scene, two-hander opera of the same name that Rimsky-Korsakov composed in 1897.
Alan Buribayev conducted the Rimsky with the RTÉ NSO on Friday, when he paired it with the Mozart Requiem, which also features musically in the opera. The obvious alternative pairing – something by the rarely heard Salieri – would have been equally interesting, though not necessarily of similar box-office appeal.
Forget the colourful, tuneful Rimsky of Sheherazadeand the fairy-tale operas. The composer of Mozart and Saliericreated instead a genuine psychological drama that's faithful to Pushkin's words, extremely deft in its handling of both genuine and faux Mozart (it has a gag about a dreadful street-fiddler, too, brought off with real aplomb by Helena Wood, the NSO's guest leader on Friday), and which keeps its listeners fully in its thrall without any actual arias.
Its grip on Friday was greatly enhanced by the strength of the two soloists, Alexander Vinogradov, a Russian bass with striking presence and a voice of impressive resonance and power, and Irish tenor Paul McNamara, presenting a flightier, more creative Mozart. Buribayev’s handling of the orchestral writing was light and fluid.
Rimsky’s unjustly neglected masterpiece was followed by a consistently vital performance of the Requiem that Mozart so famously failed to complete. Buribayev stuck with the familiar version, completed by Mozart’s pupil Franz Süssmayr, but the performance stood out as the most dynamic that I’ve ever heard in concert in Dublin.
The speeds were brisk, but the tread was so firm, the touch so light that nothing actually sounded rushed. The RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, trained by guest chorus master Mark Hindley, was at the top of its game, and the vocal quartet (McNamara and Vinogradov joined by soprano Regina Nathan and mezzo soprano Anna Stephany) was strong collectively as well as individually.
The orchestra was in action the previous Tuesday lunchtime, with Gavin Maloney conducting two works by the South Africa-born Irish composer Kevin Volans. Volans chose just two works, his 1995 Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (commissioned by the BBC for Peter Donohoe and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble), and the 2010 Symphony: Daar Kom die Alibama, commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival.
As heard on Tuesday, the concerto sounded more on the lines of an anti-concerto, with the soloist Isabelle O’Connell so knitted in to the orchestral texture that there was very little that was either soloistic or concerto-like to be heard, although the piano does get the last word. There’s a lot of copying and shadowing between piano and orchestra, but the effect is of a kind of desultory tangling, and, as in the tangle of a jungle interior, although the musical material was distinct in nature, it felt as if there simply wasn’t enough light.
The Symphony, says Volans, is called a symphony by way of reference “to the original meaning of ‘sounding together’”. You could think of it as a long, hand-knitted scarf, the knitter not following any pre-ordained plan, but choosing patterns on the spur of the moment as they seem apt.
It’s a piece that seems to hover or drift slowly. The magic of it lies not only in the way Volans charms the ear with the often gorgeous orchestration of his material, but also in the subtlety of his transitions. Or, you might well say, the effective elision of the sense of transition – the morphing of musical states is as big an attraction as the musical states themselves.
The Irish Baroque Orchestra’s Masterworks series found itself at a new venue this week, St Finian’s Lutheran Church on Adelaide Road. It’s what you might call a boutique venue, small, warm and welcoming on cold or wet January evenings and with the opposite acoustic challenge to most churches – it’s actually a bit on the dry side.
The strategy behind the IBO’s Masterworks concerts is pretty clear – major works by major composers. This year there were five concerts, with cantatas and motets by Bach and Vivaldi and orchestral suites by Telemann featuring in each of the first four programmes, and a reprise of most of the Telemann for the last one.
I got to the first two concerts, on Tuesday and Wednesday, and enjoyed the fresh-voiced enthusiasm of Scottish soprano Susan Hamilton. She opened the series with Bach's Cantata No 82, Ich habe genug. Ich habe genug?I hear you say, "Isn't that for bass rather than soprano?" Well, yes, it's for bass. But it also exists in a version for soprano, with the obbligato oboe replaced by flute (here the excellent Lisa Beznosiuk).
The blandishments of Hamilton’s singing notwithstanding, the combination of soprano and flute seemed less apt in a work contemplating death than the darkness of a bass voice and the penetrating tone of an oboe.
It may also have had something to do with the actual quality of Hamilton's singing. On Wednesday, in spite of her nimbleness, she didn't seem quite at home in Bach's Cantata No. 202, Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten,the WeddingCantata.
On both nights, she was altogether more impressive in Vivaldi, taking the virtuosic display of In furore iustissimae irae, RV626, in her stride, and finding the expressive point in Laudate pueri, RV600, too. It's actually not often that Vivaldi gets to upstage Bach, but that's how things turned out here.
The Telemann suites, which included the famous one nicknamed Water Musicor Hamburger Ebb und Fluth(it was written for the Hamburg Admiralty's centennial in 1723), were a pure delight.
Some of the effects in the Water Music– cooing recorders over a gently pulsing string accompaniment in a Sarabande, or the upper strings' pizzicato accompaniment of cello and bass in a Harlequinade – have that je ne sais quoiwhich can make Telemann so very special. The IBO's playing, directed from the violin by Monica Huggett, was utterly delectable.
