SYMPHONY CONCERT REVIEW. Thursday, 3 April, 2025. At Cape Town City Hall. CPO conducted by Bernhard Gueller, soloist Yaron Kohlberg; Weber: Overture to “Der Freischütz, Op 77; Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No 3 in C, Op 26; Tchaikovsky: Selection from “Swan Lake” Ballet, Op 20. DEON IRISH reviews.
Having been out of town for the orchestra’s entire Summer Season during January of this year, this was the first symphony concert I have attended at this venue since mid-November. It seemed like an age ago.
On this occasion, proceedings commenced with a curtain-raiser performance by the CPO Youth Orchestra. They played the final two sections of Rimsky-Korsakov’s exceedingly demanding orchestral suite, Capriccio Espagnol, Op 34, of which no less a commentator than Tchaikovsky himself wrote to the composer: “Your Spanish Caprice is a colossal masterpiece of instrumentation and you may regard yourself as the greatest master of the present day.”
At the rehearsals in preparation for the work’s first performance, in October 1887, the orchestra members were so enthusiastic that they applauded every section. The grateful composer immediately asked their permission to dedicate the work to “the artists of the Imperial Russian Opera House orchestra”, the dedication the printed work bears to this day.
This history underscores the uncompromising demand that the work makes on all sections of the orchestra – with prominent solos being assigned to various players, most notable the solo violin (on this occasion played in convincing manner by the talented young leader, Mikael von Eschwege).
Wonderful young talent
The performance – under the direction of Liam Burden, who is on the staff of the Hugo Lamprechts Music Centre – even if not always musically polished, was certainly gratifying in showcasing the wonderful young talent at present being burnished in the wider Cape Town community. It might sound paradoxical, but what most impressed was how close these young instrumentalists got to delivering unqualified orchestral excellence in the really taxing episodes of this work. So, to give just one example, the exhilarating chains of thirds for (particularly) wind players, were really brilliantly delivered; and that excellence of ensemble was not attributable to the presence of a number of teachers and full time orchestra members making up numbers in the overall orchestral complement.
Crisp ensemble, good balances
The CPO then took to the stage for the advertised programme, commencing with Bernhard Gueller’s reading of the evocative overture to Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz, a work which has enjoyed far more frequent outings at this venue in the last three decades than has the same composer’s overture to the opera Oberon, which many consider the better work.
On this occasion, the score received a carefully measured reading, evidenced by the generally crisp ensemble and good balances achieved. The instantly recognized horn ensemble of the opening measures did evoke one chord of questionable provenance; but thereafter the section’s contribution was exemplary. (I should mention that due to the sudden indisposition of the principal horn, the section included a player who was perforce playing without having attended the rehearsals. She received due and deserved acknowledgment from Gueller in the course of the evening.)
The overture is a distillation of the opera’s highly Romantic thematic elements; the struggle between good and evil, represented by the trio of principal characters as also by the quasi-gothic character of the Wolf’s Glen and its resident ghouls and gremlins. So, the central episode of the overture gave Gueller and the orchestra some scope to luxuriate in its depiction of the mysteries of the night, the highly charged writing at last giving way to the triumphant concluding measures based on the heroine’s the heroine’s aria, a redemption of the previously dark and baleful forest for light and for good.
Prokofiev’s third piano concerto
We were then treated to a performance of Prokofiev’s third piano concerto, written in 1921 during a summer holiday in the Breton coastal town of St. Brevin-les-Pins. Although the work might date from that holiday, the composer himself records the long genesis of the thematic material used in the work, one section of which (the parallel ascending triads at the end of the first movement) dates from as far back as 1911.
The concerto was premiered by the composer in December 1922 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Frederick Stock. It was then given a month later in New York, under the direction of Albert Coates (who subsequently moved to South Africa and died in Milnerton in 1953.) The composer wrote a detailed analysis of the score for the premiere, which serves as an additional vade mecum for any artist intending a performance of the piece.
On this occasion the artist was Yaron Kohlberg, the Israeli-born son of a Professor of Islamic Studies. Some irony, then, in him being the object of vilification of a rather bedraggled group of protesters outside the hall.
The concerto opens with an evocative theme for solo clarinet in a gentle andante pace which is then taken up in expressive manner by the strings before the meat of the movement arrives in an alacritous outburst by the piano soloist into an enlivening allegro. This is where some difference of approach emerged, with Kohlberg seemingly pushing for a somewhat more molto mosso delivery than Gueller seemed willing to assent to. My instinct is that Gueller – who after all is very familiar with this orchestra and the hall’s acoustic – was concerned about maintaining cohesion in the chains of unforgiving semiquavers that lay ahead for, particularly, the winds – and the più mosso indication still to come later in the movement.
This underlying tension should not be understood to have detracted from what was an exhilarating performance of a mercuric movement, Kohlberg having more than sufficient opportunity to display what might be thought of as characteristically Soviet-style finger work, nigh percussive in its mechanical brilliance.
No such restlessness undermined the succeeding Theme and Variations, one of Prokofievs’s happiest inventions, the theme used having been preserved in his musical pantry since 1913. This theme, although infused with something of the satiric, is nevertheless a good deal less overtly mordant than are so many frequently encountered episodes in the composer’s earlier works.
This was a lovely performance. The tempo had a beguiling, limpid quality which permitted a suitably leisurely examination of the compositionally clever variations that followed: the first, essentially a piano solo with an orchestral conclusion, gave Kohlberg opportunity to display some of the quieter and more delicate attributes of his tonal palette; the second an almost Czerny-like exercise in precisely delivered rapid scales and bouncing octaves; the third a sort of Hexentanz in cross-bar stressed triplets, the orchestra punctuating the accompaniment with suggestions of the principal theme. Quite delicious!
Beguiling quietude
The simply lovely fourth variation assumed the status of a kernel of beguiling quietude at the centre of the work: a gentle meditation on the variant possibilities of the slightly quirky theme, in extension of note values and in augmentation of intervals, in mirror image and in skeletal rhythmic shape. Kohlberg demonstrated absolute clarity of purpose, with subtle application of weight resulting in refined dynamics, Gueller matching the solo line with the most sympathetic of accompaniments.
After a joyous account of the ebullient final variation with its final restatement of the theme (which gave rise to an enthusiastic burst of applause from a good deal of the audience) we had the ever vigorous finale, much of the thematic material being derived from a planned “white” string quartet – that is, a piece without accidentals, such as could be rendered entirely on the white keys of a piano.
Prokofiev eventually abandoned the project, finding the possibilities too artistically unsatisfactory and the result potentially monotonous. I have to confess a feeling that some of that criticism could equally be directed at this finale which (and I accept that this is entirely a personal shortcoming) I have long considered too thematically weak to convincingly crown the work, notwithstanding its invigorating episodes, energetic orchestration and vivacious coda.
But that implies no criticism of an entirely absorbing account of the piece, more particularly an almost manic delivery of the coda, delivered with apparent note perfection and winning drive to a rapturous reception from an enthusiastic full house.
The concert concluded with some excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s superb score for the ballet, Swan Lake. The excerpts – chosen by Gueller himself and differing both in choice and in order from the more usual suite derived from the ballet – received what might be termed an affectionate reading and served to demonstrate that, whatever accolades Tchaikovsky may have paid Rimsky-Korsakov, he was himself an orchestrator who needed to yield to none other.
What: CPO conducted by Bernhard Gueller, soloist Yaron Kohlberg
Reviewer: Deon Irish
WS
