SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

On the Importance of Not Being Too Earnest

There is something appropriately other-worldly about listening to music as the light of the day fades in the courtyard of the medeaval Caetani Castle of Sermoneta. The crickets seem to be well educated; they have been chirping all day and with the first note of music they stop. The stifling heat of the day diminishes as the sun goes down and with a bit of luck there is the first whiff of a ventilating breeze.

But all is not well. It is very difficult for a body of string sound to carry in the open air and the Caetani courtyard does not have a helpful acoustic for strings. A solo violin is quite another matter, as I shall show in a minute. I admired the way this handicap did not overwhelm the workmanlike determination of the talented Prague Sinfonia Orchestra with their conductor, Christian Benda. His tempi were slower than usual, probably to allow more time for the sound to make its effect. But this is a situation in which, however professional the approach, you can’t win: slowing the tempi also causes loss of musical sense.

The programme opened with Le Nozze di Figaro overture and ended with the Haffner symphony. Both pieces have Mozart’s wit to the fore. It was just this element which had, however, been sacrificed to the slower tempo. You can’t be witty and take your time about it ! That is all the more the pity since there were some elegant turns of phrase, especially in the symphony. Rhythmic precision was well attended to for the most part, except where it was threatened by slower tempi.

The very best playing came in the first encore of the Coriolan Overture. Here finally, was a piece where Beethoven wants the players to be in earnest. And so they were. Admirable. The second encore was the Don Giovanni Overture, which Maestro Benda reminded the audience, was written for Prague. Mozart and da Ponte called this a drama giocoso in two acts. Fortunately, most of the giocoso (playfulness) comes after the curtain has gone up but the Prague Sinfonia certainly delivered well on the drama.

There was a huge turn-out for this concert, with standing room only. This may have been partly because of the violin soloist, Fabrizio von Arx, whose amazing talent found early expression at the Sermoneta Masterclasses. If beauty of sound is your priority with a violinist, Mr von Arx is your chap. He has the most insightful, innate sense of phrase of any player known to me and will surprise you with musical discoveries as he takes you through what you thought was familiar musical territory.

The Bruch concerto is the perfect vehicle for this unique talent. The tone is always rich and what used to be called Mediterranean, but never showy: it is too musically sensitized to fall into that trap. His projection of sound reaches into the heavens and nothing is lost in the night air. He is a fine master of that difficult technique of more sound with less volume (with the decreasing of volume, his projection proportionally increases –a skill which was a speciality of Montserrat Caballé, but perfected by only a few violinists). This was breathtakingly expressive in the opening of the Adagio (second movement).

Unfortunately, the Sarasate Carmen Fantasia is very simply not von Arx’s piece. Sadly, there is no recording of Sarasate playing this work. I don’t myself see any advantage in performing it in the orchestral version (against the usual piano accompaniment). This can easily lead to the soloist and orchestra coming apart in the final gallop, which is what happened in Sermoneta, though they managed to correct this when they were cheeky enough to play the second part of the piece as an encore.

To explain what went so wrong here, I shall have to make a diversion to an occasion when I heard a genuine stop-the-show performance. Some years ago, a friend who is the manager of a small, little-known theatre in Rome, invited me to a try-out promotion evening of an exceptionally young and totally unknown Siberian violinist. This was Vadim Repin. When he played the Carmen fantasia (with piano accompaniment) the audience went delirious with applause. And laughter. …..The little dog laughed to see such fun, And the dish ran away with the spoon !

Repin must have been about fifteen at the time. Later, in the trattoria, he took a lighter out of his pocket and appeared to set aflame his left hand. The rest of the company were shocked until he began to shake with laughter at his little prank.

I don’t know Fabrizio von Arx very well, but I would take a bet that there is not much of the prankster in him. And if the little dog doesn’t laugh to see such fun, the dish will not run away with the spoon. Von Arx sounded as though he was approaching a Liszt Transcendental Study. The Carmen Fantasia is as far away as you can get from that.

And dear Fabrizio, given that you had a fine orchestra sitting there, why could you not have given us an encore of the Intermezzo from Thais. We would have all hugged you for it.

Jack Buckley