Conductor Susanna Mälkki and soloist Andreas Haeflige offer excellence, but a divisive programme.
📍Usher Hall, Edinburgh
📅 27 Aug
🕖 8:00pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 1 hour 45 minutes
🗣️Conductor: Susanna Mälkki
🎹 Piano Andreas Haefliger
🎵 Composers: Kaija Vista; Sibelius Tapiola, Dieter Ammann The Piano Concerto (Gran Toccata)
🎂 Parental Discretion
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilet, Audio Enhancement Assistance Dogs Welcome
The Helsinki Philharmonic are an unquestionably thrilling musical unit, and under conductor Susanna Mälkki create a dynamic, and polyphonic world. Opening with Sibelius, the audience were transported into a mysterious Finnish world, cold and beset by dancing winds painted in twirling motifs. A grandly beautiful opening, it cast a spell wrought in elegant, fragmentary melodies, and couched in enigmatic strings, and playful woodwind. This is music which conjures stories in the mind, an advancing adventure through snowy wilderness, and endless forest. At one moment becalmed, alone in the snows, before being swept into a fully orchestrated storm of brass and percussion, there’s a sense of constant evolution. There’s an elegant prayer like quality to the conclusion, the fluted winds falling quieter, and quieter, before a final peace.
Following with Kaija Saariaho Vista, only perpetuated the enchantment, taking all to the Californian coastline to play, and try not to drown amidst the waves. Through the two movements, Horizons and Targets, this was another journey into abstracted wildness. The first is an uneasy sea of strings, upon which first rides a curious oboe melody, joined by tinkling percussion, trilling woodwind, and mournful brass. There’s marked eeriness to the ranging harmonies, and sepulchral strikes of the bass drum, a sense of approaching the ineffable. Just as matters seem to approach a grand discord, all descends into a hazy, cooler miasma. Targets immediately blasts the listener into another mode, a thumping marriage of brass and percussion awakening any sleepers. There’s a franticness to the jumping xylophone, and a queasy unease to the sliding brass. It’s music to score a horror movie to, a dance of surging crises through anxious strings, and catastrophic timpani. Though it finally settles into a more becalmed state, it’s more the still waters before a shark breaches the surf to claim another victim.
Dieter Ammann The Piano Concerto (Gran Toccata) played post-intermission is certainly a very grand affair. Thing is, it’s not really a concerto, more a fight between pianist and the orchestra, who don’t so much play off each other as run into each other. Andreas Haefliger (the piece was written for him) certainly gives a bravura performance of the many long, complex sequences demanded of him, but is inevitably swallowed up by the unrestricted blast of the gathered musicians behind him. There seem to be two different philosophies at work, the first a desire for a darkly jazz infused virtuoso turn on the keyboard, the second to make as much noise as possible from an orchestra. Now, the sonic hits of the mustered musicians is quite thrilling, physically speaking, but the piece only achieves any sense of light and dark, when the orchestral might is lifted, to let tinkling descents or warmer brass, or even the pianist shine through. When free to execute one of the lengthy cadenzas, Haefliger is unquestionably brilliant, his fingers flying, the relentless progressions amazing. There’s a peculiar majesty when his score leads to the deeper registers, a roaring cry from the strings which stirs the blood. All too soon though, snare drums and massed instrumental interventions crash back in upon the piece, until finally Gran Toccata seems most concerned with bouncing the audience out of their seats with grander and grander ‘kabooms’. It ends in quietude, the piano sounding a single note as it did on opening, which is quite pleasant. Certainly it’s a piece of ‘event’ music, but one memorable more for its fireworks, than any memorable composition.
(Image Credit: Andrew Perry)
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