Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
Marek Janowski (conductor)
Orfeón
Donostiarra (José Antonio Sainz Alfaro, director)
Michaela Kaune
(soprano)
Rosemarie Lang (mezzo-soprano)
Gunnar Gudbjornsson
(tenor)
Carsten Stabell (bass)
Tuesday 27 August 2002
Kursaal
Center, San Sebastián, Spain
Presented under the
auspices of the
Quincena Musical de San Sebastián 2002
Mozart: Symphony No. 41,
K. 551 ("Jupiter")
Bruckner: Mass in F Minor
Basque Symphony Orchestra
Cristian Mandeal (conductor)
Marta Zabaleta
(piano)
Ildiko Komlosi (mezzo-soprano)
László Polgár
(bass)
Thursday 29 August 2002
Kursaal Center, San Sebastián,
Spain
Presented under the auspices of the
Quincena Musical de
San Sebastián 2002
Montsalvatge: Fanfarria para la Alegría de la Paz
Escudero:
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Bartók: Duke Bluebeard's
Castle
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Ashkenazy
(conductor)
Saturday 31 August 2002
Kursaal Center, San Sebastián,
Spain
Presented under the
auspices of the
Quincena Musical de
San Sebastián 2002
Smetana: Má Vlast
The
San Sebastián Music Festival was founded in 1939, and the people of
the city take special pride in the fact that it has continued uninterrupted for
63 years, despite World War II, natural calamities and terrorism. From being a
fashionable seaside spa resort for European royalty in the 19th century, San Sebastián
(Donostia is its Basque name) has become a popular summer destination for
all kinds of people: 300,000 tourists visit the city annually (the majority from
Spain, France and Italy) — old and young; interested in the high culture of
the Quincena Musical and the Film Festivals or in enjoying the plentiful
nightlife. Roughly 52,000 people attend the Festival each year; many in the
audience are local residents or come from Bilbao and other Basque cities and
towns. People pay little attention to the ubiquitous police and masked special
forces, who tear nationalist banners off the walls and look ready to intervene
in any illegal activities. It is not that people are heedless of the continuing
political strife in their homeland, but they believe that life goes on despite
violent interruptions. Each day the halls are full.
The Festival's largest venue, where opera, ballet and symphonic performances
take place, is the controversial Kursaal Center, dubbed by the locals the "Moneo
Cubes" after architect Rafael Moneo. The center consists of two glass blocks
situated on the waterfront; there are no verticals in the buildings, and the
concave glass panels give the impression of sea waves. At night, when the
translucent glass is illuminated from the inside, the "cubes" can easily serve
as huge, modern lighthouses.
The Kursaal, which opened in 1999, has three auditoriums; the largest one, with 1,900 seats, was the venue for these three orchestral concerts. The hall's acoustics are bright and extremely clear: booming sonorities quickly become almost unbearable, and the slightest imprecision is as transparent as the glass panels of the cube.
These unforgiving acoustics highlighted the deficiencies of the Berlin Radio Symphony's performance under its new music director, Marek Janowski. Their playing of the "Jupiter" Symphony had precision and drive, but was so unrefined that one could hear only a booming mass of heavy, unyielding sound. The conductor emphasized the score's dramatic qualities and pushed the orchestra too hard, thereby losing the transparency, elegance and nobility of Mozart's music.
The same problem persisted in the Mass. Bruckner's music in general has a heavy, bombastic quality to it, and this Mass, where Bruckner tried to create an effect of Baroque grandiosity, is no exception. Janowski's tilt toward the dramatic rather than the contemplative served the composer's writing quite well, yet the overwrought climaxes were often too much to bear in this hall. What's more, Bruckner's music does not, by its nature, stay contemplative for long, quickly turning into doubt, struggle or ecstasy; Janowski's rush through what contemplative music there was robbed the Mass of any sense of reverence and spirituality. The young local chorus, Orfeón Donostiarra, sang superbly, especially in those sections that did call for spiritual tranquility. The soloists have very little to do in this Mass — all for the best in this case, since these weren't particularly strong, though the men were more interesting than the women.
Things were quite different two nights later with the Basque Symphony Orchestra. The Festival considers the presentation of Basque music, Basque orchestras and soloists as one of its major missions, and the local media pay special attention to the local performers. This is a big change from the Franco years, when classical music (for which the Generalissimo did not much care) was relegated to third-class status throughout the country. Today, symphony orchestras have sprung up in every city; they get generous help from the national and local governments and from private corporations. All this attention has begun to bear fruit, as can be heard in the high musical and technical quality of the Basque Symphony, which in May 2002 celebrated its 20th anniversary.
The first half of the concert included works by the Catalan composer Xavier Montsalvatge (1912–2002) and the Basque composer Francisco Escudero (1913–2002). Montsalvatge's short and bright fanfare combines Catalan dance elements with a modern tonal style; its festive character comes from chord progressions played by the brass, followed by dance rhythms performed by the percussion alone. Escudero's Piano Concerto (1946) is an impressionistic, conventionally tonal piece that uses Basque melodies and rhythms for its themes. Its three movements are written in traditional forms, and the music is predominantly pleasing, with little drama or modernist harshness, though the second movement begins with a brooding bass clarinet solo. The Basque pianist Marta Zabaleta displayed brilliant technique and steady aplomb; her phrasing was natural, without even one affected gesture — simple yet effective.
The well-trained orchestra maintained its high musical standards through the more challenging work on the second half, a concert version of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle. In this opera about the miseries and splendors of love which, when uncovered, lead to love's demise, the sheer beauty of the music never gives you the feeling of tragedy. The conductor and the orchestra gave an inspired performance, combining broad strokes with delicate shadings, the massive brass well balanced against the winds and the strings, even in the most fortissimo episodes. The playing was passionate, yet the sense of design behind the passion never ceased to be present. László Polgár, who has made something of a specialty of the role of Bluebeard, gave an outstanding performance, conveying all the aspects of his complex character, from weightiness to lyricism to otherworldliness. Despite a powerful voice and some fine episodes, Ildiko Komlosi was not a convincing Judith: her vocal production seemed forced, patchy and unsteady, and she lacked legato and tonal subtlety. Despite that shortcoming, it was a very worthwhile performance overall. As Kodály noted about Bluebeard's Castle, "the dramatic curve and the musical curve develop parallelly and mutually reinforce each other, like a magnificent double rainbow" — similarly, Bartók's score and the Basque Symphony mutually reinforced each other here.
The San Sebastián Festival's final orchestral concert was the performance by the Czech Philharmonic under its music director Vladimir Ashkenazy, whose contract with the orchestra expires in spring 2003. Despite the financial, logistical and artistic difficulties that this orchestra has suffered since the fall of Communism, the players were in fine form, and their performance of the tone poems that make up Smetana's Má Vlast was idiomatic and pleasurable. This work is something of a Czech national icon, and the Czech Philharmonic has its own way of playing it and didn't always seem receptive to Ashkenazy's interpretation; still, conductor and orchestra together produced an exciting and inspired reading, with the winds playing especially well. "Vysehrad" was rendered with melancholy and nostalgia for lost glory; "Vltava" ("The Moldau," named after the river running through Prague) with an uninterrupted flow; "Sarka" with ferocity, though not with rampant militancy as the poem is often interpreted; "From Bohemia's Meadows and Forests" with a spirited breeziness; "Tabor" and "Blanik" — where the music is somewhat repetitious — with steadfast hope in the great future of the country.
The San Sebastián Festival's audience is an appreciative one. The listeners
do not rush to the exits as soon as they feel that the concert is about to end:
without exception, they stay in their seats and reward the artists with a long,
sincere ovation.
