Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert 14 March 2009 - Before the Icons

Featuring:
- Einojuhani Rautavaara Before the Icons Australian Premiere
- Saint-Saens Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor
- Richard Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra

Janine Jansen - Violin
Vladimir Ashkenazy - Conductor

This concert is a little bit out of ordinary for me because of several reasons: I attended the open rehearsal of this concert on Wednesday that week, got a free ticket to the Thursday concert on Wednesday night. I then went to the concert on Thursday night, only have to be leaving early because of my other commitments, and finally went back again to the concert on Saturday - almost LATE! - for the full concert.

Let's start with the rehearsal. It was really the first time for me seeing MSO rehearse in Hamer Hall. The sight of musicians wearing casual shirts is interesting, very much contrasting to their formal attire during concert. More interesting sight is the shirts that Ashkenazy and Janine Jansen wore during rehearsal. They both wore a plain white shirt, but with a black and white picture of a composer imprinted in front of the shirt. I wasn't really sure who was the composers, but my best guess for Ashkenazy's is either Richard Strauss or Mahler and I'm 90% sure that Jansen was wearing Saint-Saens shirt (another 10% goes to Verdi).

The rehearsal started with Saint-Saens' violin concerto. There wasn't as much interaction between the conductor, soloist and orchestra apart from three or four interruptions during the first movement of the concerto. A little bit nitpicking here and there from Ashkenazy and that's about it. The same story goes with the 2nd and 3rd movement. Jansen played beautifully during the rehearsal, and I like her performance during rehearsal better compared to her Thursday's performance. After that, they went on playing the whole concerto again and that's it.

To my disappointment, I couldn't witness the orchestra rehearsing Strauss' Zarathustra. Instead, Rautavaara's Before the Icons were rehearsed and this time, there were a lot more discussions between the orchestra and Ashkenazy. The music didn't hit home for me, but I grew to finally like it during Saturday's performance.

There was some drama going on with the audience sitting just in front of me on Thursday performance. There were this elderly couple which behaved in perfectly fine manner until the middle of the Rautavaara piece. The lady started passing a candy to her husband, and they both started unwrapping the candy and they both did it in how a person would do thing in concert hall: quietly. However, unwrapping candy quietly in concert hall is no easy feat, and it would actually took longer than the usual time to unwrap it. As most people are aware of, the unwrapping sound is rather distracting, and is actually one of the deadly sins in going to concert. Their attempt went on for one minute before I noticed one lady sitting in front of the couple started shooking her head. The usher then came and tried to ask them to stop. Unfortunately, it was in the middle of quiet passage, so the usher had to use some hand signs to convey the message which was not understood by the gentleman. The lady wasn't too happy being told by the usher, and muttered her disgust. The usher, thinking that her message was understood, left the couple, but would you believe it, the couple continued unwrapping the candy! It took a gentleman who sat in front of the couple to turn around and cast his disgusted look and expression to the lady before the lady started to realise what's wrong with her. With that, I lost 3 to 5 minutes trying to enjoy the piece, and subsequently I did not get the rest of the piece. A pure disaster, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who felt this way.

Jumping straight to Saturday, I myself almost committed another sin in going to concert - being late! I was solving this hard Samurai Sudoku (I solved it before the concert, if you wonder :) ) before I realised that I was running out of time to go to concert. I arrived there seconds before the performance started and had to inconvenient quite a number of people because I was sitting in the middle row. Okay, now to the performance..

The Rautavaara piece was described as a 'Pictures at an Exhibition', a series of musical portray of one standing before these Orthodox icons: 'The Death of the Mother of God', 'Two Village Saints', 'Black Madonna of Blakernaya', 'The Baptism of Christ', 'The Holy Women at the Sepulchre', and 'Archangel Michael Fighting the Antichrist'. The equivalent of 'Promenade' in this piece is called the 'Prayer'. The piece started out with two big bangs, only to be really quiet for a long long time, until we reached the 'Two Village Saints' where the playful folk theme echoed in winds and strings. Then it continued again, but to be honest, I'm not sure where the music were until we reached the end of the piece. There were one melody that I loved in the piece that was played by the strings, and one nice chorale played by the brass during the end. If I were to sum up the piece, I would say it is an impressionistic piece with plenty of modern harmonies imbued - not unlike Takemitsu's pieces.

After being challenged by 'Before the Icons', we were sweetened by the romantic third violin concerto of Saint-Saens. Here, the music is much more accessible, the playing of the soloist was great and supported well by the orchestra. The gorgeous melody in the second movement was very much suited with Jansen's lovely tone. The duet between the clarinet and the soloist is quiet beautiful. The third movement showed some fast, close to furious, playing from the soloist and the joyful end of the movement brought much applause from the audience. Comparing the performance of the Thursday and Saturday, I've found that there were some not-so-perfect notes during some of the moments when the soloists needed to play ascending notes. Other than that, I loved her playing very much. She looks gorgeous in her dress (she wore the same dress on Thursday and Saturday), played elegantly with some knee flexing actions involved. She looked totally involved in the music, 'banging' her head during some of the orchestral tuttis and marching passages. Also, she gave a beautiful rendering of Bach's Sarabande from the 2nd Partita for solo violin as the encore for both performances. Lovely tone, although I prefer Bach to be played in more masculine tone.

On Thursday, I left early during the Zarathustra and felt a little bit underwhelmed by the famous opening. It simply wasn't grand enough. The section following the opening was gorgeous and I left during 'Of the Great Longing' when the organ played the quotation from the Magnificat - IIRC. The Saturday's performance was a great one, this time the opening was grand. The timpani stroke was as powerful as it can be, the brass was amazing and the organ in the end (whoa!). The rest of the movements were played very much straight forward, with credits must be given to the orchestra's front-desk strings for fine playing. Love the two gorgeous ladies from the viola section. One distracting thing during this performance is the sound of Ashkenazy's watch when he conducted the piece.

A very fine concert, with a chance to see two musical giants in the same concert. The concert was quite popular, around 90% of the seats were occupied. The next concert is actually today's ACO concert (embarrassment of the riches - too much fine music in a space of less than 24 hours!), I'll blog about it later.