SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Saxå Chamber Music Festival 2009 :  Saxå Bruk, Sweden, 25.6.2009 (GF)

Saxå ©Bruk

Saxå Bruk is a closed down ironworks with a long history, going back to the late Middle Ages. It is situated on Lake Saxen in a beautiful part of Central Sweden, between Karlstad and Örebro, about 280 kilometres from Stockholm and 350 kilometres from Gothenburg and Oslo. In the manor, owned by well-known restaurateur Carl-Jan Granqvist, an annual Chamber Music Festival is arranged during the last week of June ‘when the night is at its shortest and the day is at its longest’. This summer was the 24^th year. An interview with the initiator and Artistic Director Peter Eriksson will be published before long.

The core of the roster of participating musicians is a group of leading string players from the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and various guests. This year I managed to attend two concerts. The first one was in the nearby village of Grythyttan, where there is a beautiful red wooden church, built in 1632, the same year that King Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden was killed in the battle of Lützen during the Thirty Years’ War. Nicely decorated and with the ceiling designed as a blue sky with white clouds the church also has excellent acoustics, well suited to piano music. The internationally renowned Lucia Negro, since 1982 also the house pianist of the Stockholm Philharmonic, had chosen Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental Goldberg Variations as her lunchtime offering and whether one chose to contemplate on the altar piece, elevate one’s eyes to Heaven as depicted on the ceiling or just imbibe the greenery in the open air through the church windows, this was the ideal setting for Bach’s all-embracing musical invention, lasting in Ms Negro’s reading more than eighty minutes.

Playing Bach’s keyboard music on the harpsichord seems to come closest to the master’s intentions but I have heard the Goldberg Variations in an arrangement for string trio, which sounded totally convincing. Still it seems, especially having heard Lucia Negro, that a modern concert grand steers an agreeable middle course: less aggressive than the harpsichord, less smoothed out than the string treatment. The light touch and the airy phrasing of Lucia Negro renders the piano tone a fortepiano character that is wholly appropriate. The opening Aria, which is a sarabande, at once showed the delicacy of her playing, the effortless, clearly articulated ornamentation and the ‘singing’ melody, which tends to elude harpsichordists. The first variation with its syncopations testified to her rhythmic vitality, so important in this work where many of the movements are dances, and in the second variation the clarity of her articulation made the contrapuntal writing emerge unmasked.

After the first few variations I simply didn’t take any more notes, feeling fully confident in the rightness of her playing and the rest of the concert I simply closed my eyes and let myself be enclosed by the music, feeling rejuvenated when the aria returned, tying the beginning and end together. The standing ovations were certainly well-deserved.

In the evening Saxå Manor hosted a concert with music from Vienna classicism to impressionism. The hall, upstairs in the 200-year-old building, is an ideal venue for chamber music and one can imagine that during the palmy days of the ironworks similar concerts may have been held there. Seating around one hundred listeners there is a cosy and intimate atmosphere, the musicians are very close and it doesn’t matter an iota that your seat is at the opposite end of the room and you sometimes only glimpse the players. Every bar, every note, every inflexion is tangible. The high summer heat flowed into the room and I felt a little sorry for the musicians who had chosen to wear dark suits, but the temperature obviously didn’t affect the playing.

Debussy’s Cello Sonata was an appropriate opener. Composed in 1915 as the first in a planned series of six sonatas for various instruments – only three came into being – it is a short and intense work in three movements, the last two played attacca. It is also technically demanding, which didn’t cause Elemér Lavotha, since many years solo cellist of the Stockholm Philharmonic, any problems. It was a sensitive and powerful reading and Lavotha was excellently assisted by Lennart Wallin.

Lucia Negro, not wholly exhausted after her Bach marathon a few hours earlier, gave a well balanced interpretation of a Sonata in F Major by Joseph Haydn, where lightness and clear articulation again were her hallmarks.

After the interval, where the hall was given a badly needed airing, there was more Haydn. A string quartet, made up of Magnus Ericsson, Anette Wistrand Lavotha, Peter Eriksson and Elemér Lavotha, gave a fine version of the first movement from String Quartet Op. 64 No. 5, the so called Lark Quartet, which derives its nickname from this particular movement, where the first violin soars high up in the blue above the more earth-bound other three strings. Magnus Ericsson’s was an uncommonly energetic lark, more flesh and blood than some more anaemic specimens one sometimes hears.

Since this year is not only Haydn year but also Mendelssohn year, the quartet had chosen to juxtapose the two composers, playing the airy Canzonetta from Mendelssohn’s first quartet immediately after Haydn. It was actually a pity that they were not allowed to play the two movements together without applause in between.

The concert was concluded with what is arguably Edvard Grieg’s most full- bloodedly romantic work, his third Violin Sonata, brimming over with typical folk music influenced themes and rhythms and surging melodies. Joakim Svenheden, for nine years leader of the London Philharmonic but since a number of years sharing the same post with Magnus Ericsson in the Stockholm Philharmonic, was on his most intense and ebullient mood and sparks were flying, maybe also horsehair from his bow, when he excelled in the final Allegro animato. Lennart Wallin was again a superb accompanist. The standing ovations were of the kind that made me wonder if the cut-glass chandelier would fall down from the ceiling. Luckily it didn’t. My only regret was that I wasn’t able to attend the other concerts as well. First class music making in perfect venues and in beautiful surroundings – that’s the unbeatable concept during the Saxå Chamber Music Festival.

Göran Forsling

For information and tickets: www.saxa.se