Irish Times critics review Kopatchinskaja, RTÉ NSO/Epple at the NCH in Dublin, the Ulster Orchestra - Thierry Fischer at the Ulster Hall in Belfast and the Haydn Trio Eisenstadt in Draíocht Blanchardstown Centre in Dublin
Kopatchinskaja, RTÉ NSO/Epple
NCH, Dublin
Liszt - Two Episodes from Lenau's Faust.
Mozart - Violin Concerto No 4.
Brahms - Symphony No 3.
Many years ago, in an old periodical, I came across an article lamenting the homogeneity of tone and style in modern violin playing. The older generation of players, the writer argued, had been altogether more strongly differentiated from each other than players of the then current generation of Heifetz and Menuhin.
The writer would surely have been appalled if he lived to hear how and for how long homogenisation took hold. But he might well have become heartened by the reclamation of distinctive gesture that has taken place more recently.
The young Moldovan player, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who made her first appearance with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra on Friday, is a case in point.
She's one of those musicians who's decided to take the vocabulary of sound and expression opened up by composers in the 20th century and exploit it as a resource when working on the standard repertoire.
Her tone is free and full, her responses to the music she plays are minutely detailed, and at the same time she gives the impression of a kind of spontaneity that's rare on the concert platform.
On Friday, however, she didn't manage to convince that the fourth of Mozart's five violin concertos is the sort of work that really benefits from the kind of attention she bestowed on it. The far-out fantasy of her chosen cadenzas - Mozart rolled over by the 20th-century avant-garde -may have come as a shock to the system, but it did have a clear connection with her broader interpretative approach.
The bells. whistles and pirouettes of the contemporary encore she offered (whose name I didn't manage to catch) proved a more apt, and thoroughly crowd-pleasing vehicle for her talent.
German conductor Roger Epple, also making his NSO debut, kept the orchestra at a safe distance from the soloist's exaggerations in the concerto. He relished both the seeping atmosphere and high jinks of Liszt's Two Episodes from Lenau's Faust, the first, Der nächtliche Zug (The Procession by Night) evoking Faust in the forest with a religious procession in the distance, the second, Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke (The Dance in the Village Inn) being an orchestral version of the familiar Mephisto Waltz for piano solo.
Epple gave a sober and sonorous account of Brahms's Third Symphony, sharpening the orchestra's responses in the process, though not quite to the point where the players appeared to be delivering all he was demanding of them.
Michael Dervan
Ulster Orchestra - Thierry Fischer
Ulster Hall, Belfast
Brahms - Symphony No 1. Symphony No 4.
If ever there was an end of programme item it is Brahms's First Symphony, the most heroic and triumphal of the four. For the third and last concert in his short "Brahms Fest" Thierry Fischer, however, elected to place it at the start of the programme, before the Fourth Symphony.
Although there are precedents, this may be one reason why it turned out to be a performance which brought incidental satisfactions rather than one which built the music to a resounding apotheosis.
I began it by admiring the warm blend of the Ulster Orchestra's strings and wind in the stately opening, and ended by feeling that some of the spikiness which had seemed obtrusive in Fischer's Schubert and Beethoven cycles wouldn't have gone amiss here.
The brooding introduction to the last movement came off well but the middle movements were strangely non-committal.
The first two movements of the Fourth, however, brought some of the finest playing of the series. Fischer had a firm grasp of the first movement, with singing inner lines and positive phrasing, while in the second movement his sure pacing and steady beat allowed the melodic lines to bloom naturally. In the course of the cycle there have been times when the tempi have not seemed to sit naturally on the music, moments of self-conscious detailing. But the performances were always lively and true to the text, observing all the repeats, and never took the scores "as read" or merely reproduced some received interpretation, past or present.
Dermot Gault
Haydn Trio Eisenstadt
Draíocht, Blanchardstown Centre, Dublin
Haydn - Trio in E flat Hob XV: 30.
Beethoven - Trio in D Op 70 No 1 (Ghost).
Schubert - Trio in B flat D898.
The Vienna-based Haydn Trio Eisenstadt was formed in 1992, and has had its current line-up of players -Verena Stourzh (violin), Hannes Gradwohl (cello), and Harald Kosik (piano) - since 1998.
Haydn, naturally enough, finds a prominent place in the group's work. They've performed all of his piano trios in concert, are in the processing of recording them all for CD, and have recently embarked on a 17-disc project to record his Scottish songs with Scottish singers.
So it came as no surprise to find one of Haydn's trios, the Trio in E flat, Hob XV: 30, opening their programme at Draíocht in Blanchardstown on Saturday. The performance itself, however, was surprising, in that it offered the weakest playing of the evening.
The music-making was soloistic rather than chamber music-like in interplay. And, in spite of a propensity for intrusive, heavy-duty ritardandos at phrase-endings, there was much in the playing that sounded casual rather than purposeful. The evening's single encore brought a second offering of Haydn. This time the Finale of another trio in E flat, No. 29, was delivered with the kind of concentrated focus and persuasive balance that had earlier been lacking.
The evening's longest work, Schubert's glorious Trio in B flat, suffered from some of the problems of the opening Haydn. Too much of the rubato tended to underline the obvious, and there was an earnestness which undersold both delicacy of sentiment and playfulness in the music. It was Beethoven's Ghost Trio which drew the best from the Austrian players, the outer movements pointed with urgency, the long central Largo aptly potent in its frequent restraint.
Michael Dervan
