Tchaikovsky : Violin Concerto (Baiba Skride, violin)
Strauss : Don Juan
Falla : The Three-Cornered Hat - Suites 1 & 2
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Jaime Martín
Five seconds into the first piece, you knew you were hearing Tchaikovsky. Yes, that looks like a truism, the Violin Concerto was the scheduled first item, but I have heard many orchestras give performances of Tchaikovsky - and good performances at that - that still do not quite have that unique sound, indefinable, but unmistakeable. It's a question of the quality of timbre of the various sections, of the equilibrium between them, it's a subtle perfume, a specific tonal colour, an atmosphere that normally only the Russian orchestras and their Russian conductors (on good days) really get right. It would have been absolutely perfect had the soloist possessed that little extra spark too.
Baiba Skride was good, certainly, but to my mind she lacked what I might term the "wow" factor. Although there was no doubt that she could play it all - and the Canzonetta was particularly lovely - there was an element of pure excitement missing. The first movement was more Allegretto than Allegro moderato, just a shade too slow for my taste, although it allowed for a good contrast with the snappy Finale, but that sense of challenge, of dancing on the razor's edge, that the great virtuoso concertos of the 19th Century have, was absent. I was, in any event, listening more to the orchestra than to the soloist, which is not really the point of the exercise under any circumstances, no matter how much the orchestra was worth listening to.
The orchestra continued to be engrossing throughout the second half. Strauss's Don Juan, which is the work that definitively put the young composer on the international music map, was given a vibrant, majestic reading. Again, the orchestral colours were perfect, the detail in Strauss's elaborate but scrupulous orchestration coming through sharply without ever distracting from the whole. Here was swagger and passion, panache and despair, the Byronic anti-hero version of Don Juan that is Lenau's reading of the character, mad, bad and dangerous to know, in all his glory and misery.
Although the subject of Don Juan is set in Spain, there's nothing particularly Spanish about Strauss's music (any more than there is in Mozart's opera). The character is, perhaps, too universal for that. However, the link was there to complete the programme with another tale of a Spanish lecher, though this one considerably more good-humoured than the previous piece. Falla's concupiscent Corregidor comes to no worse an end than being somewhat humiliated and getting tossed in a blanket, to general amusement and merry-making.
After spending some years in Paris, the outbreak of the First World War obliged Falla to return to Spain, and it is in the latter years of wartime that he produced several of his best known pieces.
As a result of the years in Paris, his orchestral style leans heavily on French Impressionism, but remains bathed in the rhythms and colours of his homeland, making much of his music extremely challenging, to say the least. It was a challenge met head-on, and with complete success. The detail of the playing was extraordinary, pinpoint subtlety, precise articulation, dynamic grading, yet all bound together with verve, enthusiasm, and sheer, infectious joy.
Jaime Martín has had a successful career as a flautist, and given the groups with which he has been associated, I've surely heard him play, even without knowing it. However, it's the first time I've ever come across him as a conductor. He does not appear as the most charismatic of figures, an apparently unassuming man, with a tidy, unextravagant demeanour on the platform. Judging from tonight, though, he certainly knows how to get the best from an orchestra. More, please!
[Next : 6th December]
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