Start the season with a moan and a bang

The Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra’s (JPO) final season started with both a whimper and a bang. As the audience arrived on opening night, we learned that Daniel Boico, who was to direct the performance, had suddenly fallen ill and would not be showing up. Instead, Bernhard Gueller, a stalwart of the JPO, picked up the final rep where Maestro Boico left off, with his steady, experienced hand.

The program included two popular favourites: Sibelius’s Violin Concertoand Dvorak Ninth Symphony (“From the New World”). Both are amazing compositions, beautiful enough even for a regular like this writer (who’s heard more times than he can count) to sit down and enjoy without a single complaint.

The concerto featured the soloist Yi-Jia Susanne Hou, a Chinese-Canadian violinist who has performed in many concerts in South Africa over the past 10 years. Her sound was loud and clear, and she and the orchestra played the late romanticism of the piece to the fullest. She tore up each sentence with a sharp attack and a mighty wave of her arm, as if Achilles himself bowed before her. She shook her head, she doubled over, she leaned back, she swayed throughout her performance. We in the audience couldn’t help but be impressed and show it off in our standing ovation, but it must have been completely spent, as no encores were forthcoming.

The New World Symphony lots of enticing melodies mean it can be played any way by any orchestra (and the JPO performed it very skillfully), and the track will always be enjoyable. Dvořák was inspired by African American spirituals, traditional Native American music, and the pure experience of the great American outdoors when he composed the symphony, and these expansive effects on his musical imagination are clear every time I hear the room. It covers a wider range of emotional expression and uses a deeper orchestral color palette than in any of his earlier symphonies, and it comes across as pure delight to a listening audience.

A 20th century program

The following concert marked the happy annual tradition of combining the strengths of the JPO with those of the KZN Philharmonic, an excellent sister ensemble to Durban. The event was made even more rewarding by the presentation of an all-twentieth-century program – an uncommon pleasure at JPO concerts.

Playing the pieces also revealed some interesting sonic connections; Prokofiev’s second Romeo and Juliet suite opened the concert, followed by Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blueand Rachmaninoff Symphonic dances the farm.

The Rachmaninoff carried, or so I thought, the obvious influence of Prokofiev, with its restless rhythms and building patterns that made for a well-crafted and ironic masterpiece. Gershwin’s jazzy chestnut leaned heavily on plans for Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos. And Rachmaninoff and Gershwin learned colorful new orchestration techniques from French composer Ravel. As the history of music expands, it displays deeper and deeper connections between its parts.

The conductor of the concert was a new guest, Rebecca Tong, a Djakartese, who arrived dressed in a severe all-black suit, and whose podium movements were small, lively and, above all, fast. She launches at dizzying speed into the dance “Montaigu et Capulets”, which she continues for most of the first half of the concert, and which the orchestra apparently struggles to follow. Every beat was meticulously marked, but the players were behind a number of times.

A distinctive part of the concert experience is being in a room with hundreds of strangers, hearing the same classic works of art voiced by hot bodies in real time. This part was strongly highlighted during the second concert, which seemed sold out, as I couldn’t see a single empty seat from my vantage point across the entire venue.

A full house brings some increased energy to a performance, and it also usually brings a bit of extra noise. A spectator saw fit to punctuate the immediate silence after the final agreement of Romeo and Juliet with a single very loud cough, which gave the impression that we were applauding his vehement lungs as much as we were the orchestra.

Rhapsody in Blue brings out the formidable South African pianist Nina Schumann. She matched Tong’s fast tempos enthusiastically and took advantage of her opportunities in piano solos to bring quieter, slower moments into the music. Schumann is an intellectual and penetrating performer, but her Gershwin seemed above all marked by unflinching pleasure. She jumped and jumped and jumped around the keyboard, and hinted at swaying beats without fully indulging in them. (I admit that I missed part of his cadenza in the middle, because that’s when the spectator next to me, a complete stranger, fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I was too paralyzed by my state of social panic to pay much attention to musicians at this point.)

All the shamelessness of the evening culminated with Rachmaninoff – the composer best suited to fervent musicians and hungry audiences.

The Symphonic dances is one of the finest works by the great Russian, completed shortly before his death, and the actors performed it brilliantly. The sound that echoed up to my seat on the balcony was warm, beefy and confident. The dance element of the title fell with delight. In the final movement, Rachmaninoff plays to the traditional chant “Dies Irae”, which he quoted obsessively throughout his life. Tong and the JPO highlighted every instance of it, until it resonated powerfully across the room.

A colorful travel diary

The final concert of the season brought a thankfully more bearable group of fellow listeners, the welcome return of Daniel Boico and an intriguing and unusual concert schedule. It sounded like a colorful travelogue: Spain (via Russian art), Japan (via Armenian curiosity), France, Russia and Hungary filled out the list. And the performance turned out to be even more delectable than expected.

Starting with Rimsky-Korsakov Caprice Spanish, an exuberant suite based on Spanish folk melodies, Boico and the JPO seemed to ignite the air in the hall with dance. Boico usually leads with flair and verve, and he was a shining example of those gifts. His floating hand movements and the delicious alternations of plucking and bowing of the violins were just as fun to watch as the music was invigorating to listen to.

This was followed by the JPO’s first-ever marimba concerto: a mid-20th century work titled Japanese woodblock fantasy, by Armenian composer Alan Hovhaness. In the 1960s Hovhaness traveled to Japan where he studied a number of traditional instruments and compositional techniques, which were used for this Fancy. After so many conventional symphonic dishes, the Japanese prints concerto brought a refreshing breath of otherworldliness to the Linder Auditorium.

The marimba soloist hummed hauntingly up and down in mystical modes, and the woodwinds slid dissonantly as the strings hummed and all floated in static, impenetrable harmony, like ethereal insects suspended in mid-air.

Later, thundering timpani and booming trombones broke the spell with insistent martial rhythms, and the piece ended with the full orchestra repeating the main melody in a building crescendo while the marimba solo feverishly hammered its registers and beat a sudden final chord. .

The soloist of the evening was the eminent South African percussionist Magdalena de Vries, and she played with brilliant panache and touching sensitivity. At times she would play her marimba so lightly that no percussive attack could be heard, only the soft echo of the note rising wistfully from the stage.

At other times, using harder mallets, she sounded more like a splenetic blacksmith or a hyper-enthusiastic rock drummer as she moved up and down the keys. His tenderness finally won out, in the first (and only) encore of the season – a meditative chorale by JS Bach, which his wooden bars sang plaintively as if it were a small church choir.

After an interval, Boico gave a few more twists in the musical kaleidoscope, as he conducted a warm and gentle rendition of Debussy Small Suitethen a heartbreaking version of Mussorgsky Night on Bald Mountain. The program ended with Liszt’s forever green symphonic poem The preludeswhich warmly reminds us why we choose to attend live concerts.

The trombones made the uplifting heroic theme so brawny, and the French horns delivered such a seductive love theme, that I found myself smiling throughout the performance like a dorky fool, so won over by the romance. music that I forgot where I was.

At high points, my friend and I could literally feel the sound waves vibrating through our legs and feet, and when the music dropped to a whisper, I felt like the fullness of my own beating heart drowned it out.

The artists’ somatic closeness, the physical exertion of their bodies on pieces of wood and metal, and the sheer element of risk inherent in live musical performances, are indelible experiences that can never leave an appreciative listener. DM/ML

Jared Beukes is a Johannesburg-based classical music enthusiast, film blogger and financial services agent. The next JEA season begins on October 20, 2022. Information will be available at their website.

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