Zoltán Fejérvári, Wigmore Hall

Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann

We decided to make a Sunday excursion to London, as one does, and popped into Wigmore Hall for a morning recital by a young Hungarian pianist, Zoltán Fejérvári (who is apparently not as young as he looks – he looks young-20s and has been winning competitions since 2017, but with difficulty and a lot of googling we found a festival website that gave his year of birth as 1986, which makes him 36 this year).

He payed full of charisma and humor, most appreciably in the opening work, Beethoven‘s Fantasia in g, opus 77.  This work bounces all over the place and was essentially an improvisation that the composer set to paper.  Beethoven was famous for his improv works, which rather than being stately and to established form (but made up as they went along) really did cover every conceivable style, often all at once.  So it was here that Fejérvári shone.

The final work of the morning, Schumann‘s Piano Sonata #1, written when the composer was 22, also moved around different styles, but in a structured manner without the wild juxtapositions of Beethoven’s work.  While this work also showcased Fejérvári’s talents, I could not help think throughout that this work should not have been a piano sonata, but rather called for orchestration.  But of course that is my reaction to a lot of solo piano music.  (There is a reason I so rarely go to solo piano recitals – just not my thing.)

In between came two additional works, which Fejérvári performed without break (just a short pause but no room for applause).  The second was successful: an Impromptu in G flat by Schubert, with a wonderful lyrical tone (Fejérvári made the keyboard sing, but wouldn’t this have sounded better arranged for more colorful instruments?  or as a Lied?).  Before that, though, came a dull Adagio in b by Mozart, seemingly there after the Beethoven to highlight how over-rated Mozart was (there, I’ve said it again!).  This may not be entirely fair to Mozart, as the Beethoven fantasia was a free-flowing creative work and the Mozart adagio was set, but Beethoven was the inventive genius who freed music, and Mozart, though enormously talented and a composer of much wonderful music, made much less impact on musical development as a whole, and after several years working based in Salzburg I am even more tired of him, something which this adagio was not going to change.

Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Musikverein

Berg, Bruckner

I headed back into the Musikverein’s Golden Hall this evening to hear the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the city’s second world-class orchestra, perform under the baton of its new music director, Andrés Orozco-Estrada.  

Orozco-Estrada is a Colombian conductor who trained and has spent most of his career in Vienna, called back to this city after having been away in Frankfurt the last few years.  He is adequate – his performances are functional if unenlightening.  I must say, I had instead considered going to a concert down the street at the Vienna Symphony’s usual home venue, the Konzerthaus, which also had an interesting evening in the schedule (Dvořák’s not-enough-performed Requiem under the baton of a rising young Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv, but with the not-so-exciting Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra).

But it was the solo violinist who attracted me to tonight’s concert at the Musikverein: the young Norwegian Vilde Frang.  I’ve heard her a couple of times before (including my first ever concert inside Salzburg’s Great Festival House) and her confident full warm tone has impressed.  Tonight, she gave us the Berg violin concerto.

This concerto in many ways made a good continuation from Monday’s concert: an intelligent deconstruction of music.  If Larcher’s concerto performed on Monday was seemingly inspired by Schostakowitsch, Berg’s this evening was openly derived from Bach, starting and ending with a chorale and seeing what the composer could do with the music in between.  The inspiration for this concerto was the death of Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old daughter of Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel and her second husband Walter Gropius.  Manon appears to have inherited her mother’s ability to be a muse for older men, and had bewitched Berg too.  So he wrote this concerto in her memory… and then he himself suddenly died from complications from an insect bite.  It was the last composition Berg ever wrote.

It’s peculiar, as was Berg’s wont, but Frang made it almost seem easy and relaxed.  I am not always sure that the orchestra, under Orozco-Estrada, helped clarify much, but the orchestra did sound good and allowed Frang to do the heavy lifting for this piece.

More memorialization came after the intermission, with Bruckner‘s seventh symphony, written as Richard Wagner was dying and whose death during composition inspired the funeral chorales on Wagner tubes (often mistranslated as “tubas”), instruments Wagner had invented (and Bruckner was scoring for anyway).  Once again, the orchestra played well, indeed beautifully (particularly those brass chorales, the woodwind section, and the extravagant celli), yet I never did feel that Orozco-Estrada quite understood the architecture of the symphony, and at times it got downright muddy (not the playing – the interpretation, although I suppose the interpretation was actually rather adequate, but it did not elucidate anything).

Tonkünstler Orchestra, Musikverein

Schubert, Larcher, Bartók

I have not been in the Musikverein’s Golden Hall since before the pandemic began.  That, and a need to hear live orchestral music after a steady recent diet of chamber music, drew me to a concert this evening of the Tonkünstler Orchestra of Lower Austria, a wonderful Austrian regional orchestra, excellently led this evening by a guest conductor, the Finn Hannu Lintu.

I had not heard of contemporary Austrian composer Thomas Larcher before this evening, but his Violin Concerto, premiered in this hall in 2009, made me curious for more.  The work was an intelligent deconstruction of music – the movements started out tonal and broad (the first rather aetherially, the second summoning Schostakowitsch to a degree) and then expanded from there, pulling out all of the threads of the music and recombining them, while sailing higher and higher into the overtones, and using alternative ways to pull music from strings (not as a gimmick, as often done by contemporary composers, but rather as an elucidation of what actually forms the music in the first place).  Larcher gave the entire orchestra individual lines, so the solo violin was more primus inter pares.  But in doing so, he also scored this for a chamber-sized orchestra so as not to overwhelm the violin soloist – this scoring was probably necessary as the concerto was written for violinist Isabelle Faust, who gave the premiere, and although she has a wonderful tone it is not especially big.

Tonight’s soloist, by contrast, was the young American Benjamin Beilman, who trained at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, who makes a much larger sound than Faust (and no less pleasing).  He adeptly handled Larcher’s not-easy constructions with profound beauty (where needed) and by sending the music out into the hall.  A solo encore (left unidentified) allowed him to move through a variety of styles as well, this time without orchestra, to further demonstrate his skill.

After the intermission, Béla Bartók‘s Concerto for Orchestra made a lot of sense set up by Larcher’s concerto.  Bartók had used the full orchestra effectively, passing the solos and dialogues around, all the while saying something new (for the mid-twentieth century).  The model here was a baroque concerto grosso, although nothing in this piece is baroque – it was a rethinking of musical convention, much as Larcher would do 65 years later.  This juxtaposition enhanced the understanding of both works.

Curiously, the concert had opened with music by Franz Schubert – an overture popularly referred to as his “Rosamunde Overture” although that was a publisher’s mistake made decades after his death (it’s actually the overture to the incidental music of a different play).  I did not really see the connection between this overture and what followed, except that Lintu used the overture to highlight lines played by differently assorted instruments.

The orchestra’s playing was exceptional, especially considering all of the exposed lines.  Except that actually it probably is no exception – this is a fine orchestra I have enjoyed for many years even if I have not gone to many of its concerts in the last few years.