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Patrcia Kopatchinskaja’s Personal Universe New York
Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall
10/19/2024 - & October 18, 2024 (Ann Arbor)
Tania León: Raíces
Dmitri Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1, Opus 77/99
Benjamin Britten: Sinfonia da Requiem, Opus 20
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, Opus 82
Patricia Kopatchinskaja (Violin)
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner (Conductor)
E. Gardner, P. Schoeman (© Mark Allan)
“I think he must have been drunk when he wrote that.”
Benjamin Britten (on a passage of a Sibelius symphony)
“There is no reason...why innocence should not be a valid theme for music; but to dwell on it for thirty years argues a certain arrested development.”
Colin Wilson, on Benjamin Britten
For their single New York concert this year, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) packed more excitement, pathos, and overwhelming wonder than other orchestras can show in a one-masterpiece-a-performance week.
Briefly, the LPO gave us three (count ‘em,three) masterpieces in their too short two-and-a-half-hour performance, as well as deft vision of Central America including one of the world’s most unusual instruments.
Then again, Edward Gardner is at the helm of an orchestra associated with their founder, Sir Thomas Beecham. And the reputation continues on. We only had to listen to the shimmering string consorts in the Sibelius Fifth Symphony, or the massive percussion in Tania León’s Raíces (“Origins”). Nor have I ever heard such gymnastic timpani playing as that of Simon Carrington. Carrington not only gave the binding threads to Ms. León’s work, but he actually started the concert with a poundingly series of thwacks.
Those first notes came for Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia de Requiem, a piece written in 1942 commissioned and celebrating the first few millennia of the Japanese Empire. (This was written before Pearl Harbor, but while Japan was ally of Germany: Even composer have to make a living.)
Mr. Gardner led the LPO through three totally different movements, all based on sections of the Roman Catholic Mass. This must have confused the hell out of Emperor Hirohito, but so fascinating was the music, that he would let it slide off his Imperial shoulders.
Even for Britten, this rarely-played masterpiece was unusual, The first movement was almost athematic, Mr. Carrington’s kettledrums as foundations of chromatic tropes repeating themselves over and over. An obvious Kyrie Eleison. So it was no surprise that the next movement was a kind of Dies Iræ.
Except that Benjamin Britten–who never ever needed to plagiarize–was plagiarizing whole sections from Firebird. That notwithstanding, Mr. Gardner’s LPO made it sound almost original.
I wonder whether Britten made any attempt for the finale to sound Japanese, the way he made Prince of the Pagodas sound literally Balinese. This was because almost all the instruments were doubling up with others in minor seconds. Was this his idea of Japanese music? Possibly. At any rate, Britten never allowed a single measure to sound boring.
Ms. León’s work was a fine orchestral work. Granted, I could not follow the thread of the work. Then again, I didn’t care. The composer (who was present, as the LPO’s composer-in-residence) filled Carnegie Hall with birdcalls, with foresty sounds, with traipses through unknown paths, drumming from outside, and music which–if resembling Villa‑Lobos film music–had the addition of a Peruvian chime made out of animal toenails!.
Which animals? Llamas? Jaguars? Agoutis? Probably mundane sheep and goat nails. But the chimes added a dark timbre.
The last piece was Sibelius’ Fifth, and all one can say is that the LPO and Sibelius are as unbreakable as saunas and Finland itself. Everyone waits for those repeated brass chorales and the stabbing last chords. But Mr. Gardner emphasized with his orchestra, those long long melodic lines, the dense orchestral webs, the melodies stretching into a far flat horizon through the Finnish forests.
For some, the highlight–no, not the highlight, the pinnacle of a mythically lofty mountain–was the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto. Not played by but conquered by the peerless, eccentric, unimaginably deft Moldovan-born Patricia Kopatchinskaja. And for those of us raised on its dedicatee, David Oistrakh, this was a totally different work.
P. Kopatchinskaja (© Marco Borggreve)
Oistrakh created, in my opinion, the second most poetic concerto of the 20th Century (after Berg, of course). Ms. Kopatchinskaja upped the poetry first to passion. And then to a raging, ferocious, agonizing scream of pain. Whispered, sinister frightening pain like never heard before or after.
Arriving on stage holding her fiddle and the score up high, she started the Nocturne with the bow almost suspended from the strings. As she continued, Ms. Kopatchinskaja became, both physically and musically; more ferocious, jumping up and down, almost colliding with the conductor, offering two middle movements so fierce that one was taken aback.
That cadenza, the pages turned by the conductor, was a whirlwind of notes, fingers (and Ms. Kopatchinskaja) leaping up and down. One could have praised the technique, the styling, the other‑worldly whirling. As for myself, I said goodbye to poetry, goodbye to triumph. And except for those who think Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s bloody war paintings are merely “beautiful”, goodbye to beauty itself.
One does not hear Patricia Kopatchinskaja as a brilliant technician or the usual Force of Nature. She is a force of tsunamis, earthquakes and medieval Black Plagues. And happily shunning mere encores after the Shostakovich, she left behind a residue of dust and diamonds and demands by this listener, for a return again and again.
Harry Rolnick
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