LONDON, BARBICAN — MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL, JULY 2007

 
Having three weeks ago called the Barbican´s Mostly Mozart festival anodyne, I was pulled up to realise that one of the concerts — given by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard — included the British premiere of Magnus Lindberg´s Violin Concerto. He is not only one of Finland´s leading composers but the world´s, a prodigious musical intellect whose modernist sensibility and habit of producing complex streams of notes hardly marks him out for summer pops. In fact, Mostly Mozart is more ambitious than many such series  and this concert was altogether arresting. Playing in sharp-etchedper iod style, the orchestra gave a captivating account, with François Leleux, of Mozart´s Oboe Concerto, and Dausgaard´s approach to Beethoven´s Eroica symphony seemed a controlled recklessness.
 
Lindberg´s music has a similar quality — ever about to topple under its own dynamic densities but always reshaping itself into timely formal eloquence. The Violin Concerto, completed last year for the evening´s soloist, Lisa Batiashvili, who premiered it at New York´s Mostly Mozart, makes no stylistic concessions to a middlebrow audience, and though scored for Mozartian forces, you hardly notice that. The presiding impression is of hefty sonority and relentless continuity. The strings are routinely divided in up to 18 parts, and the six wind fill out the tutti deftly. There is a glistening lyricism to the writing — most notable in the high solo line of the quiet opening — but more typically a hectic, cutting sonorous-ness, and a virtuosity not merely assigned to the soloist. The three movements flow as one: the divisions between them surprised me as I followed the score.
 
... The triumphant athleticism of the solo part evokes Sibelius´s vibrant acrobatics, and an emphatic quaver figure running throughout is surely an allusion to that composer. It dominates the final bars, and the feeling of rightness and repletion at this point reflects a harmonic logic that has been rocklike throughout. Theper formance we heard was no less solid — indeed, it was dazzling. Batiashvili may be a mandatory beauty, but she was
astounding.

 
... before conductor Thomas Dausgaard and his orchestra moved on to Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, they were joined by Lisa Batiashvili for the first Britishper formance of Magnus Lindberg's Violin Concerto. The textures Lindberg generates are rich and potent, and the climaxes have a crushing weight, so Batiashvili's solo line never had to fight to make itself heard in the Barbican. The concerto plays continuously for about 25 minutes, but falls into three distinct movements with the slow central one emerging from the debris of the lengthy first, and linking to the scurrying finale via a massive cadenza for the violin. The harmonic and thematic issues of the concerto are wonderfully integrated, the solo writing virtuosic and tellingly expressive.

As with that for clarinet, Lindberg's Violin Concerto is a significant addition to its re per toire, and if the present reception was largely for Lisa Batiashvili's assumption of the solo part, this was hardly unwarranted. A player having previously impressed for her sense of line and purity of intonation, she demonstrated a virtuosity second-to-none among what is now a formidable crop of younger violinists, while her co-ordination with the orchestra — aided by Thomas Dausgaard being among the most astute accompanists of present-day conductors — impressed with its precision and unanimity.
 
The Lindberg ended a lengthy first half that had otherwise consisted of Mozart ... Nothing if not ambitious, Dausgaard devoted the second half to Beethoven's ‘Eroica´. Those familiar with this, or any other volumes in his and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra's excellent survey of the orchestral music (on Simax) will know just how positively he effects the compromise between historical awareness and interpretative license. The first movement was powerfully shaped at a driving tempo in which articulation did not suffer; the apex of the development section was startling in its dissonance, and control of tension in the coda was judged to a nicety. The 'Marcia funebre' was kept moving but lacked nothing in pathos — the central fugato infused with a sense of striving rather than yearning, and the disintegrating final bars touching in their inwardness. The main section of the scherzo did not 'shimmer' but had the required incisiveness, while the trio brought out the best in a trio of horns that — if not always at their best — here excelled in their jocose interplay. In the finale, Dausgaard reinforced the ingenuity of its developing-variation form with an excitement and, in the closing stages, surging grandeur that made it all of a piece to what had gone before.

On into the main hall, for a remarkable concert by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. Its 40 musicians belie the description and demonstrated comprehensively that no more are needed for the Eroica which sounded magnificent at The Barbican; no one there would have wished it had been a bigger band.
 
Their quality had inspired Lindberg to elaboration in orchestral scoring for his new concerto (strings divisi). Because of his economy in writing for a modest Mozartean orchestra this marvellous new work, its three movements played continuously, could have a fruitful concert life - if other violinists emerge with the comprehensive technique of Lisa Batiashvilli, who introduced it to England with panache and sensitivity to its beauties ...
 
The Don Giovanni overture was a powerful call to attention, and the Eroica was followed by encores, including Alfvén's Dance of the Shepherd Girl and a sumptuous showcase for the strings in Sibelius' Andante Festivo - the party atmosphere rather like Beecham's with his lollipops.