SUMMONING THE MASTERS BY CELLO
Elgar, Ravel, Franck to headline RBSO concert
The great cellist Pablo Casals gave the second-best description of the cello. “The cello,” he said, “is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful.” The greatest description of the cello contained no words at all, and this wordless description is what Bangkok will experience on Sept 2.
Sir Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto, is, with Antonín Dvorák’s Cello Concerto, perhaps the most emotional, the most endearing, the greatest tribute to the instrument ever written. And the newest star in the cello pantheon, Hitomi Niikura, will play this wondrous concerto with the Royal Bangkok Symphony Orchestra.
For those who know the work, its replaying is always a revelation. For those who haven’t heard it before, the work is one of those rare totally successful pieces by the English composer. Elgar, after all, had been accused of being too much the gentleman (or too religious) to be a great composer. In his later years, he redeemed himself, first with the highly emotional Violin Concerto, and then, for this last, large work, music that is totally different. The great writer Donald Tovey likens the first movement not to that of a regular concerto, but to a “fairy tale”. This writer has described the opening movement like images the composer experienced while gradually waking from a beautiful dream, for that opening melody is both real and illusionary.
Most listeners in Bangkok probably know it from the recording by the young Jacqueline du Pré. In fact, the
Concerto, written in 1919, was not terribly successful until her performance in the 1960s. Since then, every great cellist — except Rostropovich — had played it. (The Russian simply deleted it from his repertoire, saying that his student Ms du Pré had said everything one could say about it.)
Yet nothing in such music is ever “finished”. And in Bangkok, Hitomi Niikura will perform a work that has already given her great fame. One year ago, she was the latest to record it, for Sony Records, and it is expected to receive the same bravura reviews as her previously recorded Schumann Cello Concerto.
This, though, is only the latest triumph of the Swiss-residing virtuoso. A prodigy in Japan, she made her debut at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, while studying further in her own country. Nor is she a stranger here. In 2007 she performed as a soloist at the concert for the 120th Anniversary of Japan-Thailand Diplomatic Relations, which was supported by the Agency for Cultural Affairs.
A break came when she went to Switzerland to study at the Basel Music Academy. She graduated there with an unheard-of perfect score, returning to Japan for more study. But seven years ago, she became more than simply a cellist in Japan. Winning first prize in the Romanian International Competition, she went on to become laureate at the Orpheus Chamber Music Competition, and First Prize at Portugal’s competition.
Since 2014, she has been the assistant principal cellist of the Camerata Zurich. She also became a member of the Zurich-based Klezmer band Cheibe Balagan the same year. And while she admits to loving chamber music above all, Bangkok will be the home for her Elgar.
The same concert will feature two other most unusual works. Cesar Franck’s Symphony In D Minor, the most famous and radical work by a Belgian composer. Franck was a famous organist in the late 19th century (writing this one in 1888), and some have described his only symphony as a massive gothic cathedral. It was the first “cyclic” symphony — that is, the first in which the themes are repeated in every movement.
Others note that Franck, raised in the French tradition, was radical in using German ideas and themes — and coming right after the Franco-Prussian War, this was considered almost traitorous.
(Even funnier, Franck’s wife hated it. She was so conservative that she considered the unvarnished passion quite unseemly, very un-Christian.)
That should hardly stop the Royal Bangkok Symphony Orchestra and conductor Michel Tilkin who made his Thailand debut four years ago with two other Late Romantics, Max Bruch and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
In a sense, Tilkin is making another return, for the conductor and composer are both Belgians. For 25 years, Tilkin has not only conducted Belgium’s most prominent orchestras, but ensembles throughout Germany and Holland. He has assisted stars like the late Kurt Masur and Sir Neville Marriner (the latter of Ama
deus fame), and Zubin Mehta, while holding posts as a virtuoso trombonist with The Hague Philharmonic and Rotterdam Philharmonic.
The dream — like Elgar and the cathedral — looming over Franck will be augmented by another work impossible to classify, Maurice Ravel’s Pavane Pour
Une Infante Défunte — or Pavane For A Dead Infant.
The pavane was a slow and stately 16th-century dance not especially associated with death, but with stately occasions. Ideal for Ravel, who was always fascinated with ancient forms of music, with fairy tales, with strange pictures. (It was no trouble for him to orchestrate Mussorgsky’s ghoulish Pictures At An Exhibition.)
Yet when he wrote this piano piece, he never revealed who this “dead princess” could be. Later, when he orchestrated it, the work retained its mystery, its grace. No description is given here; one must picture this (probably 16th-century, Spanish) deceased princess for oneself.
Not that Ravel was ready to accept just any performance of the work. In France once, a pianist played it not knowing the composer was in the audience. It must have been a terrible performance, for the composer approached the pianist after, and said: “My dear fellow, this is a pavane for a dead princess, not a dead pavane for a princess.”
One trusts Tilkin will keep this in mind.