Trombone concertos are not as rare as those for the double bass, though when one of them arrives in town they still stick out like an avian visitor blown far off course. The specimen that landed in the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s concert was a brand new creation by Kalevi Aho, the Finn with an apparent mission to write a concerto for every orchestral instrument. I hope he forgets the penny whistle.
Commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s principal trombonist Jörgen van Rijen and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, this was no matchbox concerto. It lasted half an hour, time enough for van Rijen to slither, trill, ululate, sing into his mouthpiece, and achieve everything you can do with a trombone except unblock a drain.
He performed with such subtlety, too. Forget the stereotype of a lumbering, comedy instrument; van Rijen and Aho turned the trombone into a fount of melodic grace and gambolling, cradled over four generous movements by an equally refined orchestra. Beckoning woodwind tendrils, hazy strings; even the percussion avoided the raucous.
Sometimes the result was pallid, music without bones. It certainly seemed too long (an Aho characteristic). But the finale was terrific, a hiccupping rhythmic feast suddenly aborted by a return to the concerto’s dream-like opening, with van Rijen magically disappearing into a twinkling infinity of bells.
The conductor’s job in the concerto was to regulate, not interpret. However, Alexander Vedernikov’s personality clearly emerged elsewhere. The Bolshoi Theatre’s music director during most of the past decade, he attacked the suite from Shostakovich’s industrial ballet The Bolt as if still in the Bolshoi pit, shaping and colouring the music’s grotesqueries with a clarity close to frightening.
He proved equally dramatic in Sibelius’s Symphony No 1, perversely presented as the last instalment in this season’s BBC cycle. It is cast in Tchaikovsky’s shadow, true, but that doesn’t mean the symphony should be played like Tchaikovsky. Vedernikov gave us excited climaxes, heart-tugging strings, brassy brass, one thing jostling another. But where were the score’s Sibelian fingerprints? At worst, obliterated; at best, smudged.
Source.
Commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s principal trombonist Jörgen van Rijen and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, this was no matchbox concerto. It lasted half an hour, time enough for van Rijen to slither, trill, ululate, sing into his mouthpiece, and achieve everything you can do with a trombone except unblock a drain.
He performed with such subtlety, too. Forget the stereotype of a lumbering, comedy instrument; van Rijen and Aho turned the trombone into a fount of melodic grace and gambolling, cradled over four generous movements by an equally refined orchestra. Beckoning woodwind tendrils, hazy strings; even the percussion avoided the raucous.
Sometimes the result was pallid, music without bones. It certainly seemed too long (an Aho characteristic). But the finale was terrific, a hiccupping rhythmic feast suddenly aborted by a return to the concerto’s dream-like opening, with van Rijen magically disappearing into a twinkling infinity of bells.
The conductor’s job in the concerto was to regulate, not interpret. However, Alexander Vedernikov’s personality clearly emerged elsewhere. The Bolshoi Theatre’s music director during most of the past decade, he attacked the suite from Shostakovich’s industrial ballet The Bolt as if still in the Bolshoi pit, shaping and colouring the music’s grotesqueries with a clarity close to frightening.
He proved equally dramatic in Sibelius’s Symphony No 1, perversely presented as the last instalment in this season’s BBC cycle. It is cast in Tchaikovsky’s shadow, true, but that doesn’t mean the symphony should be played like Tchaikovsky. Vedernikov gave us excited climaxes, heart-tugging strings, brassy brass, one thing jostling another. But where were the score’s Sibelian fingerprints? At worst, obliterated; at best, smudged.
Source.
BBCSO/Vedernikov at the Barbican, EC2
The Times, May 16 2012
