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First Metropolitan United Church
October 22, 2021
"Declarations about war and politics are not fitting for an artist, who must give his attention to his creations and his works."
So wrote Richard Strauss in an article in 1914, explaining his refusal to sign the Manifesto of German artists and intellectuals in support of their country's rôle in what is now called World War I. Indeed, as Michael Kennedy pointed out in The New Grove, Strauss was "accustomed to ignoring politics while he carried out his musical duties".
Some three decades later circumstances were very different; Strauss was living with his family in Garmisch, but had essentially withdrawn from the world, his only compositions at the time being, as he put it, "journeywork and manual exercise".
Then came the news of the destruction of the opera houses in Berlin, Dresden and Munich, with which his career had been so closely associated for so many years. He wrote to his sister Hanna: "Garmisch, immediately after the destruction of the Hoftheater. Dear Hanna, many thanks for the kind letter. I can write no more today. I am beside myself. Affectionate greetings, Richard."
To quote Kennedy once again, "as one might have expected, the enormities of what Nazi Germany had brought upon the world and itself only began to affect him when related to music".
However, his grief and resignation also resulted in a first draft, a mere thirty bars, of an "Adagio for Strings". This would eventually be transformed into his remarkable Metamorphosen for twenty-three solo strings, one of his most profound utterances and almost certainly his only work which could in any way be viewed as commentary upon the times of its composition.
It was with a truly extraordinary performance of this great outpouring that Yariv Aloni and the Victoria Chamber Orchestra concluded their first live concert in well over a year on Friday night.
To describe the music as technically challenging would be to severely understate the case and — we might as well dispose of this right away — it cannot be denied that there were occasional patches of less than stellar intonation.
However, neither can it be denied that this was a truly moving and engrossing performance, so much so that I perforce checked my watch at the close, so quickly had the almost half hour span of the music passed.
This is both a testament to Aloni's masterly direction, forging what can frequently seem a somewhat amorphous structure into a seamless single paragraph and to his players who gave their all — and then some.
This was a performance which was the opposite of episodic, as Aloni inspired his players to a reading of singular cohesion and coherence, impassioned and intense.
I have attended some wonderful performances by the Victoria Chamber Orchestra over the years, but this may well have been their finest to date.
The opening half of the evening was rather less emotionally draining. I am sure I was not the only person in the audience who would have been hard put to name the author of the first piece, Sibelius's Suite Champêtre, Op.98b. As the opus number, for once correctly, suggests, this is far from early Sibelius, in fact it was composed during a long, otherwise fairly dry spell between the fifth and sixth symphonies. It would be easy to apply Strauss's "journeywork and manual exercise" to the music, which contains few, if any, of the attributes we usually associate with the composer.
Nevertheless, it received a fine performance; the opening movement, with its slightly lumpen rhythm, evinced a good solid weighty sound from the orchestra; the slow movement, which is perhaps the most "Sibelian", was rather lovely, with an excellent bottom end, while the finale was rustic and rhythmic, with a lively solo from Hollas Longton and a marvellously precise pizzicato close.
Carl Nielsen's Little Suite similarly displays few of his familiar compositional fingerprints, but this is readily explicable: it is his opus one and composed during his early twenties.
Yet it is also a delightful work and is one of his most frequently performed.
The opening Praeludium featured a nicely-controlled crescendo leading to its molto tremolando climax; the succeeding Intermezzo was a delightful waltz, although one imagined a village dance on the island of Funen (Nielsen's birthplace) rather than an Imperial ball in Vienna. After a weighty introduction the main Allegro on brio of the finale took off like a rocket. Here one almost seemed to detect the influence of Mendelssohn, as filtered through Niels Gade, de facto head of the Copenhagen Conservatory, who had not only taught alongside Mendelssohn in Leipzig, but had also conducted the premiere of his Violin Concerto in 1845.
To round out the opening half we had a thrilling traditional Polska from Dorotea, a town in Lapland. This was performed with gusto and was enormous fun.
A tremendously impressive evening; clearly neither Aloni nor the Victoria Chamber Orchestra have lost their touch during their enforced layoff.
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