Review: LMO presents Beethoven's Violin Concerto at The Tung Auditorium ****1/2
It may have enjoyed an official celebration before the summer break, but Liverpool Mozart Orchestra is still technically in its 75th anniversary year – and happily the quality performances keep coming too.
Sandwiched between major appearances in Liverpool Cathedral (Messiah last month and Mozart’s Requiem this coming Remembrance Sunday), the orchestra under conductor Robin Wallington pulled out all the proverbial stops in this Sunday night concert at the LMO’s usual home The Tung Auditorium.
It was a programme with a dramatic and unusual filling sandwiched between a pair of more familiar pieces, and an evening notable too for a very fine performance from rising star British violinist Cristian de Sá.
De Sá, named a Young Classical Star by Classic FM and reckoned by those in the know to be ‘one of the great violin stars of the future’, impressed before he had even picked up his 1800 Giuseppe Guadagnini (‘il Soldato’) instrument when he gave a considered and erudite insight into Beethoven’s popular Violin Concerto in the pre-concert talk.
I say popular, but when Beethoven’s concerto was first performed in 1806 it was one of classical music’s disaster premieres, and (rather like Bizet with Carmen, among many others over the years) its composer never saw it receive proper appreciation or fame in his lifetime. It took Mendelssohn and a 12-year-old Joseph Joachim to shine a deserved spotlight on it some four decades later.
De Sá, in his own youth a strings finalist at BBC Young Musician of the Year, talked of the piece’s ‘drama, beauty, lyricism, humour, joy’, and he invested his performance with all of them, crafting it with what appears an innate musicality and impressive technical virtuosity – and with a toothsome tone, even at the very highest reaches of the violin’s register where Beethoven’s melody sang out with an aching and exquisite sweetness.
Above: Violinist Cristian de Sá. Top: de Sá with the Liverpool Mozart Orchestra and conductor Robin Wallington.
The cadenza at the end of the opening allegro meanwhile was a bravura, but not floridly showy, display of both tone and technique, as was the effervescent, capering solo line in the final movement. It was all delivered too with coherence and absolute clarity, of tone, of texture, of purpose.
The LMO in turn produced rich and burnished orchestral support, the winds embarking on a warm duet with solo violin in the allegro, which also featured a pleasing bassoon line, while there was expansive playing in the larghetto and a joyful buoyancy to the rondo finale. Bravo tutti.
A very different musical proposition to Thea Musgrave’s The Seasons which came directly before the interval. The Scottish composer, now a sprightly 98 and still apparently applying pen to manuscript, aptly took a year to write the work in the 1980s, with each movement matching a season to the human life cycle and taking inspiration from famous works of art. That’s a lot to unpack.
The orchestra, under Wallington’s baton was augmented with a wall of percussion and several additional instruments – among them piccolo and contrabassoon – as well as Stephen Mannings on piano, for a visceral voyage through the year, academic term-like from autumn to summer albeit with distinctive soundscapes.
Above: Liverpool Mozart Orchestra
Musgrave has lived more than half her life in the States, and her ‘autumn’ had a noticeably ‘fall’ feel. Still, with Storm Austen and Storm Beolo tearing through Liverpool in the last week, the movement’s discordant roiling felt all too real, the LMO capturing the drama of its cacophonous clamour with a powerful punchiness.
A mournful oboe punctuating the icy, otherworldly frozen wasteland of winter gave way to vivid drip drop drip of April showers, a nicely executed crescendo with A Day in the Life vibes offering a musical rebirth and renewal with the two-note call of the cuckoo from the winds. Meanwhile brass got in on the act as spring turned to summer with a ringing repeated Marseilles amid what became a torrid aural assault.
The concert opened, aptly for the Liverpool Mozart Orchestra, with Mozart – his ebullient Symphony 31, composed during a frustrating and ultimately sorrowful (his mother died) sojourn in Paris in 1778.
More fun and frolics than evident frustration in Amadeus’s cheery work though (his first symphony to utilise clarinets), and a little devilment too in the deliberate accenting of Parisien musicians’ so-called ‘first bow stroke’ MO, emphasised nicely by the orchestra here.
There was plenty of vivacity throughout the opening allegro, although the violins’ tone took a while to warm, a nuanced andante and an enjoyable firecracker finale, which made for a more than solid opening to an evening’s exhilarating musicmaking.