VIVALDI
Cello Concertos RV 412, 416, 419
Concerto for Cello and Bassoon RV 409
Jean-Guihen Queyras
Akademie für alte Musik Berlin
X.30.2011
Concertgebouw, Amsterdam
256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)
Years ago my then girlfriend took me to dinner at Spago on the Sunset Strip (my birthday, her treat). Three tables from where we were sitting I saw a pigmy whose face looked annoyingly familiar. A bit later I almost choked on my lobster ravioli because I suddenly realized that the pigmy was a very famous action movie star - the kind that effortlessly fires a .50 caliber M2 machine gun (weighing 83 pounds) with one arm while carrying an unconscious damsel on the other. In real life, however, he projected all the menacing authority of a bipedal hamster on a high protein diet. After that sighting I never could watch the guy's movies without laughing...
A few months later I had a similar experience when I went to hear the English Concert under Trevor Pinnock playing at the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. What I heard from my seat a few rows from the stage was not the towering, muscled, athletic, edgy sonic presence of the period instrument band I knew from numerous Arkhiv Produktion CDs. Instead I heard a few thin-textured, bass-shy tuttis separated by long stretches of nearly inaudible, barely pitched buzz. After that I never could listen to a period instruments ensemble without laughing. (Which is exactly what I did at another concert where heavily perspiring Monica Huggett tried to scrape her way through the ascending melodic line with which the violin makes its entrance in the Beethoven concerto. I had to leave the concert hall in disgrace, with third degree burns left on my back by the fiery stares of numerous HIP devotees in the audience.)
I mention this bit of autobiographical trivia just make it clear that I wasn't fooled for a moment by the superlatively recorded beefy, muscular, lithe textures of the ensemble accompanying Queyras in the above performances of Vivaldi's cello concertos. Not that it mattered much to me, since the music itself easily gets on my nerves. I am just not the kind of guy who holds his breath when listening to endlessly repeated arpeggiated chords, which is what Vivaldi's concertos offer as (or rather in place of) thematic elaboration. But listen I did, and more than once, because I find Queyras' musical intelligence and instrumental craft simply irresistible no matter what he plays. If this musician can keep my attention through several numbingly predictable Vivaldi concertos, he probably would make me faint with a live recording of something more interesting, say Pintscher's Reflections on Narcissus or Holliger's Romancendres.
5 comments:
How irritating! A combination of an ace cellist and a yakuza composer. Why do they waste their time?
"Yakuza composer"? You lost me here, Ronan. I must be growing dense....
'What I heard from my seat a few rows from the stage was not the towering, muscled, athletic, edgy sonic presence of the period instrument band I knew from numerous Arkhiv Produktion CDs. Instead I heard a few thin-textured, bass-shy tuttis separated by long stretches of nearly inaudible, barely pitched buzz'...
Boom, Have you ever been to a 'period-instrument' concert in a true 'period' concert hall? North-American concert halls are a complete disaster for period instruments, of course, they were designed to house large orchestras in the age of 'boom boom' amplification (no pun intended).
It's so strange how 'hi-fi' types make such a big deal of fancy high-end stereo equipment, but never seem to be aware that the concert hall is part of the instrumentarium of a concert... Yes, I have heard period instruments in North-American concert halls and I agree that you can't hear them. But I was very lucky to hear Reinhard Goebel and his MAK in Salzburg's Mozarteum and they filled the (relatively large) hall completely with gorgeous sound (even heard from a cheap seat behing a post!), as also did John Holloway playing Biber on a baroque violin. Those halls were built precisely for such instruments and they work with them beautifully.
Jan(e) Dismas
Jan(e),
I heard Bylsma, Bruggen, and Leonhardt playing a joint recital at the same auditorium(!) within a year of the Pinnock's concert. I was closer to the stage (row 3, I believe), but not THAT much closer. And this trio projected so well that I have no issues with their "period" playing at all. In fact I just went along for what (in retrospect) must have been a hell of a musical ride. I still remember (after all those years) a long virtuoso cadenza played by Bylsma (don't remember the piece), which made an overpowering impression.
I know it sounds crazy, but this trio produced more powerful, more "penetrating" sound than the entire English Concert.
Needless to say, I did not laugh during that concert...
Anonymous has a point. More than a point, he has touched on one of my pet peeves: all too often, music is performed in venues that are far to large. Last October, I attended a performance by this very group in the Casa de Música in Porto. The building, designed by Dutch architect Rern Koolhaas, is spectacular (see: http://www.casadamusica.com/CDMHouse/default.aspx?channelID=8E905E1B-E325-4640-AA93-23081C1B7FF6&id=74FA3DE2-1D4F-4F90-97B6-745DBEE35CC5&l=8E905E1B-E325-4640-AA93-23081C1B7FF6)
But the main hall in which the performance took place has 1,300 seats. There's another concert space there, for about 600, but that wasn't used, and the reason can only be financial.
I was underwhelmed by the group's performance, but that could very possibly be because I couldn't hear them.
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