Pyotr Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64
Conductor: Lorenzo Viotti
Cello: Ettore Pagano
Almost two weeks after going to the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone for a fabulous Rach 3 that still resonates in my ecstatic ears, I was back in the Sala Santa Cecilia last Friday evening at the ungodly hour of 8:00 PM instead of my usual Saturday evening 6:00 PM performance, but then, I had only myself to blame. I had been mindlessly dilly-dallying, never mind the countless advertisements about the concert all over the city and the constant sight of the three beetle-shaped concert halls from my windows, and all the reasonably priced tickets for Saturday were sold out by the time I decided to just go ahead and buy one already.
In fact, a quick look at the rest of the Parco della Musica’s cultural season showed me that, if some potential audience members had been a bit hesitant about committing to supporting the performing arts in January, which meant that excellent seats were still available at the very last minute, they are now planning to go to whatever will be going on out there with a vengeance and buying tickets in droves accordingly, which is fantastic news for the venues and the artists, slightly less so for the procrastinators.
As for me, I simply could not resist the perspective of hearing Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto featuring Ettore Pagano, the inordinately young, gifted and fast-rising Roman cellist who would be boldly filling in for an ailing Sheku Kanneh-Mason, or Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, both conducted by Lorenzo Viotti, the slightly-older-but-still-young Swiss-born maestro who takes eclecticism to another level by also indiscriminately dabbing in funk, jazz and death metal as a percussionist.
There are few sounds that I find as darkly gorgeous as the ones produced by the cello, but the fact is, the cello repertoire being rather limited, the occasions to hear them outside an orchestra are unfortunately few and far between. So I was particularly grateful for the opportunity to discover a cello-centric piece I had never heard before, and not just any piece since it had been written by the esteemed early 20th-century English composer Edward Elgar, whose world-famous "Nimrod" is routinely heard in concert halls all over the world as well as during all kinds of ceremonies in England.
And sure enough, his Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85, an established staple of Late Romanticism, grabbed my attention from the very first notes, which turned out to be a poignant recitative from the solo cellist. Even after the other instruments had joined in, they all made sure to preserve intimacy and soberness while Pagano masterfully conveyed the understated yet inescapable bitter-sweetness of watching a familiar world disappear forever before one’s eyes. Clocking in at about half an hour, the concerto was not very long, but its impact was still felt after the music stopped.
It took a certain amount of convincing, but our young prodigy eventually heeded our persistent applause and came back for a starkly beautiful Sarabande that, to me at least, even surpassed the concerto. Bravissimo!
And then we all happily switched gears after intermission and plunged head-first into Tchaikovsky’s intensely dramatic Symphony No. 5, shamelessly relishing the privilege of basking in a voluptuous ocean of hard-core schmalz for the second half of the evening. The consistently brilliant orchestra sounded even more revved-up than usual under the particularly involved baton of maestro Viotti, who ended up having quite a breathless work-out on his stand, and delivered a thrilling account of the magnificent score. I hadn’t heard the symphony live in a long time, and that exciting performance, with its sweeping waves of passion and its quiet interludes of introspection, reminded me why I fell in love with Tchaikovsky—and by extension classical music—in the first place, and why our relationship is as burning hot as ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment