Voice gets to heart of faith
0 Countertenor Iestyn Davies performed Bach’s church cantatas in sprightly canters as well as vibrant charge, the small string group with harpsichord blending skilfully with colour and energy. Countertenor Iestyn Davies has taken his listeners on a differently create their own monsters, and for permission to play. JOYCE MCMILLAN rewarding journey this week with his performances of Bach’s church cantatas.
Yesterday, the unblemished clarity of his voice reached into the depths of Christian belief as expressed continues to share his musical knowledge by nurturing young talent and giving talks, such as this one.
Although he was brought up in a non-musical family Brendel enjoyed telling the story of how Gustav and Alma Mahler once rode bikes at his grandfather’s cycling school. He spent his formative years in Gratz where contemporary artists began to surface at the end of the Second World War, triggering in him a life-long curiosity about what was new in art.
It wasn’t just pianists, such as Edwin Fischer, who influenced Brendel, he learnt in Vergnügte Ruh’, beliebte Seelenlust and Geist und Seele wird verwirret, both sung with a humble sincerity entirely fitting to the music and Davies’s smooth tone. CAROL MAIN from listening to singers and conductors, such as Deitrich Fischer Dieskau and James Levine. For Brendel cantabile singing is at the heart of all music.
There were anecdotes about concerts, recordings and the inevitable touring tales about dreadful pianos and dead rats falling from ceilings. Brendel played some well-chosen recorded extracts including his own sublime interpretation of Schubert’s Impromptu Op 90 No.3, “letting the music speak” to end this fascinating insight into a remarkable life. SUSAN NICKALLS For one night only the Mariinsky Orchestra and Royal Scottish National Orchestra came together to share the Usher Hall stage, all under the galvanising baton of conductor Valery Gergiev. It’s the kind of extravagant, slightly madcap event that could only happen at the International Festival, but the unanswered question behind it all was: why? Perhaps simply to provide the requisite gargantuan band needed for Shostakovich’s equally gargantuan Fourth Symphony, which received a hall-trembling account from a hundredsstrong orchestra made up of both ensembles combined crammed on to the Usher Hall stage, Scots and Russians sharing desks.
When Gergiev let rip in the outer movements with the massive brass and woodwind sections, complete with ferociously scrubbing strings, it was an appropriately overwhelming, stupefying experience, but there was plenty of subtlety and even tenderness, too, in the first movement’s more desolate passages. There were a few inconsistencies across the two bands – disagreement over string sound, for example – but this was a performance about spectacle and power.
Before the interval, the two orchestras played separately. Gergiev was a little brisk and driven in Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge with the RSNO strings, but beautifully clipped and sarcastic with the Mariinsky in Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony. An unforgettable evening. DAVID KETTLE