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The Fiddlers
West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge
31 January 2007
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
1 February 2001
[Britten Sinfonia's] programme
was an exploration — a kind of sublimation — of folk fiddling. The Finnish
violinist Pekka Kuusisto was in charge. He came on before the others to
say a few words about the first item, Einojuhani Rautavaara’s The Fiddlers,
but this was no Rosenish preamble. It reminded me, absurdly enough, of
Puck’s epilogue to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Kuusisto may be 30, but
with his smooth features and flickering smile, he has a strange, boyish
charisma. His wayward playing manner suggests the prankster, yet what
you hear is of immense sophistication.
He prefaced each Rautavaara movement
with the fiddle tune on which it is based, and in the same unbuttoned
mood took the solo in Bach’s E major concerto (its adagio middle movement
went at a lick). Then came a deeply sensitive account of HK Gruber’s second
violin concerto, Nebelstein-musik, a work in which light music and constructivism
miraculously coincide. And in Mahler’s superb arrangement of Schubert’s
Death and the Maiden quartet, Kuusisto egged on the players to sublime
feats of virtuosity. A spirit of collegial joy seemed to travel through
their ranks.
Sunday Times
Pekka Kuusisto was soloist and
director of the Britten Sinfonia strings in another of this ensemble's
refreshingly diffeent concerts. It opened with the Finnish composer Einojuhani
Rautavaara's The Fiddlers, there not so much as a token to make the violinist
feel at home, but as the key to a programme in which all but one of the
pieces featured composers refracting the work of others.
Rautavaara's inspiration came
from the folk tunes and players of South Ostrobothnia, and Kuusisto prefaced
the five movements with the original melodies. Whether on his own or soaring
over Rautavaara's searing textures, Kuusisto played with complete and
idiosyncratic freedom, never fussing about beauty of tone but always acheiving
musical beauty.
Nor did Kuusisto set aside his
own fiddler-like style - bending knees and violin halfway off his shoulder
- when he came to Bach's Violin Concerto No.2: here he played with easy
virtuosity while becoming part of the ensemble. The contemporary Austrian
HK Gruber's Nebelsteinmusik, a tribute to Gottfried von Einem that finds
this often attention-seeking compsoer at his best, gave Kuusisto the chance
for a high-wire act in which he also communicated the fun to his fellow
players. More remarkable still was his infectious way of leading Mahler's
early and sometimes clumsy arrangement of Schubert's Death and the Maiden
Quartet: not only the odd maiden but whole orchestras would die to achieve
the tautness and precision on display here.
Sunday Telegraph
One thing young performers are
taught at conservatoire is: make every movement strictly functional; don't
use more energy than you have to. But some performers just can't do that.
They have so much energy and so much personality that they can't bear
to do things the sensible way. The whole body gets involved in a kind
of dance, which conjures forth the sound as if by magic.
The young Finnish violinist
Pekka Kuusisto, here performing with Britten Sinfonia, is one of these.
He seems to play the violin as much with his shoulders and knees as with
his fingers. Much of the time he stands on one leg, while gyrating the
other. Which could be really irritating, were it not that he produces
such an extraordinary sound.
That sound was evident straight off
in the first piece, a set of beautifully atmospheric arrangements of Finnish
folk songs by the senior Finnish composer Rautavaara. Kuusisto cleverly
prefaced each arrangement with the original folk tune, playing them in
his strikingly flat, hard, yet intensely alive tone.
You might have thought Kuusisto
was adopting a special 'folky' tone for that music. But in the piece that
followed, Bach's E major violin concerto, we heard the same surprisingly
small, reedily intense sound. Not once did we hear one of those 'warm',
'expressive' sounds violinists are supposed to make. And yet Kuusisto
dominated everything by the imagination and the vivid articulation he
brought to every note, and his amusing way of giving Bach's busy passagework
a kind of folky casualness.
The whole thing had a marvellous
springy lightness and a delightful naivety, as if Kuusisto had somehow
failed to notice that this was classical music he was playing.
The orchestra, who play standing up, seemed to enjoy Kuusisto's often
perilously fast tempi, and his bodily exuberance was catching - I'm sure
I saw the orchestra's leader, Jacqueline Shave, dance on one leg at one
point.
In the final piece, Schubert's
Death and the Maiden quartet (where he led the orchestra in the arrangement
by Mahler), he showed that a folky 'speaking' quality could be moving
as well as energising. And the performance of the dance-of-death last
movement was probably the most thrilling I've heard.
Daily Telegraph
With his hands-on experience
of jazz and electronica as well as classical repertoire, the young Finnish
violinist Pekka Kuusisto is supremely versatile, and his wide-ranging
programme as director/soloist with Britten Sinfonia demonstrated how one
kind of music can impact on another. He started with folk, offering solo
versions of the original tunes on which fellow Finn Rautavaara based his
suite The Fiddlers, which uses strategies similar to Bartok's to redraft
traditional material for the more cultivated sound of a string orchestra.
Not only was it interesting
to sample raw the ingredients Rautavaara cooks into such appealing gourmet
dishes, but also to note the way Kuusisto's free and easy approach loosened
up his colleagues. Rarely do classically trained players sound so idiomatic
in works with roots deep in natural soil.
Even more revolutionary was
his spontaneous delivery of Bach's E major violin concerto. The slow movement
maintained a keen forward momentum, and Kuusisto's deft decorations combined
with his obvious appreciation of Bach's wit to make the music sound improvised.
Kuusisto's platform manner is
complex. There's a touch of the silent film actor in his facial expressions,
though they are clearly an intrinsic part of his musical response and
not there merely for the audience's benefit. They were at their most vivid
in HK Gruber's Nebelsteinmusik; here again it was the music's diversity
Kuusisto honed in on. [In] Mahler's string-orchestra expansion of Schubert's
Death and the Maiden Quartet... the players went for it, as they did throughout
a programme that reaffirmed an exceptional partnership.
The Guardian
Classical
music has too few mavericks. So we should cherish Pekka Kuusisto, who
not only directed the Britten Sinfonia strings and played all the fiddle
solos in this concert, but mesmerised the audience like a latter-day Pied
Piper.
I
think this capacity crowd would cheerfully have followed the 31-year-old
Finn to Helsinki and back, so enchanted were they by his personality,
playing and musical insight.
Each
is idiosyncratic. Kuusisto never stands still. Swaying, bouncing, bending,
stamping, he's more like a psyched-up basketball star than a classical
violinist. And in his solos he faces the audience directly and stares
at us with a fey half-smile. It's a bit disconcerting, but intriguing.
His
violin technique looks equally laid-back and unhinged, but that is deceptive.
The sounds that emerge are far from accidental. Particularly in his compatriot
Rautavaara's atmospheric evocation of folk music, The Fiddlers (each movement
of which Kuusisto prefaced with idiomatic performances of the folk tunes
on which the 1952 work is based), he explored astringent, edgy sonorities
that first startled and then delighted.
Then,
astonishingly, he applied much the same raw, seemingly improvisatory spectrum
of timbres to Bach's Violin Concerto in E. I'm not sure that I want to
hear it played like that again, but it was certainly gripping.
Kuusisto's
manner, and his mannerisms, are clearly infectious. Britten Sinfonia was
as good at catching Rautavaara's haunting textures and sudden pounding
dance refrains as its director was. And the fluidity and sense of rapport
between the players was just as evident in H. K. Gruber's 1988 Nebelsteinmusik:
a muscular, fast-striding composition, ecstatically sonorous in places,
that pays homage to Gruber's mentor, the 20th-century German composer
Gottfried von Einem, through a quirky postmodern prism of jazz influences.
But
Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet, played in Mahler's masterly expansion
for string orchestra, showed the dangers of directing from the first-fiddle
desk. I loved the melodramatic contrasts that Kuusisto encouraged: tense,
histrionic outbursts running slap-bang into eerie, vibrato-less passages
where all of life seemed to ebb away. On the other hand, the first violins
had a nightmare journey through the (admittedly fiendish) passagework
of the andante variations. Perhaps Kuusisto hadn't rehearsed them with
sufficient rigour; or perhaps he demanded a tempo and a flamboyant style
that only he could maintain. Still, he's a huge, charismatic talent. Let's
see more of him.
The Times
The sound Pekka Kuusisto produces
– as both soloist and director – is lithe, wiry energetic and clean. It
is tempting to suggest that this is a young-man’s timbre – exciting, exuberant,
and needing neither rest nor sleep. Yes, this music-making is, above all,
awake. It is playing for the early morning, in the bright, bracing Scandinavian
sunshine of a perpetual summer.
Kuusisto, just turned 30, looks
and moves as if he were 10 years younger. There is something infectious
about eternal youth. The Britten Sinfonia was alive to it – and came alive
for it. There was a springy radiance to the musicians’ precision.
Einojuhani Rautavaara presents
The Fiddlers in five short bursts: they arrive noisily, reflect quietly
during the north’s endless summer night, join the organist who doubles
as a bell ringer, spot a devil seated on a rock attentive to dark forest
sounds, and perform a lively dance, engagingly named ‘Jumps’. As Kuusisto
avers, and the ensemble conveys, being a Fiddler (a folk musician) is
a question of style and attitude – “a sense of enjoyment, of always being
ready to play, whatever the occasion.”
The Bach Concerto was lean,
fresh and sinewy – full of earnest zest. Bach, Kuusisto proclaimed, had
turned his back on any Italian decoration, sighing or dallying. This was
a severe interpretation – forward thrusting, alert to the music’s scaffolding
while resolutely omitting phrasing. The result was jolly and entertaining.
The first movement had drive but not bounce; the second was wistful yet
lacking in heart and the third tore away at speed, joyously.
Nebelstein is a mountain in
the woods of Lower Austria. It was a favourite place of Gottfried von
Einem, the extraordinary teacher whom H. K. Gruber desires to honour in
this piece, commissioned by the Alban Berg Foundation. With spirited relish,
Gruber contrasts a diatonic anagram (von Einem) and a serial row emerging
as melody (Berg). Von Einem survived the Nazis (Goebbels banned his Piano
Concerto of 1944); he loved jazz, responded to a powerful heartbeat and
was imbued with “totally unsentimental affection”. With his own pulsing
vitality, Gruber paints a lively and affectionate portrait of this inspiring
man, culminating vigorously in “stretching large melodic arches over complex
rhythmic patterning”, following his mentor. Kuusisto and the Britten Sinfonia
conveyed all of this with enjoyment and verve. This was the concert’s
high-point.
As for the arrangement of Schubert,
in the first instance, Mahler was only concerned to transcribe the second
movement of this string quartet – the ‘Death and the Maiden’ melody and
variations. The notion works well. The dignified threnody makes further
gains in weight and sonority from this treatment. The finale fares well,
too – it whizzed about skittishly in the manner of Mendelssohn’s ‘Scherzo’
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, albeit more darkly. The first movement
is the least successful. Schubert’s original is too tortured and too subtle.
His shifts and lurches are more sudden that a monolithic string ensemble
can accommodate; moments of gravelled agony were not captured, either.
This was maybe not surprising, since Kuusisto had, on the whole, skimmed
neatly over weightier emotions throughout the evening. I had the impression
of his never being down to earth; lacking, in this Newtonian sense, any
gravity. The Scherzo brought some redress: the gritty emotion intensified
was more manageable because less mercurial. Overall I delighted in the
skill, but was unmoved.
Classical
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