Posts Tagged ‘Max Hanft’

Spirit of Repušić

Monday, April 24th, 2017

Ivan Repušić

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 24, 2017

MUNICH — It was a short courtship by recent standards. Dalmatian conductor Ivan Repušić (pr. REP-oosh-itch), 39, debuted with the Münchner Rundfunk-Orchester in a concert La rondine in Oct. 2015, returned for a gala two months later and signed his contract* last June. His background, happily, is stable: general music director of Staatsoper Hannover, in a relationship dating back to 2010, and chief conductor since 2005 of the Zadarski Komorni Orkestar (by the sapphire waters of Dalmatia’s coast: no fool he).

Before stepping as Chefdirigent into Ulf Schirmer’s big shoes this fall, he agreed to fashion an MRO Paradisi gloria program March 17 here at the Herz-Jesu-Kirche: Respighi’s Concerto gregoriano (1921) and the Duruflé Requiem (1947) — not the most obvious repertory from which to judge a conductor but a thoughtful and satisfying journey unified around chant and modal harmonies.

Repušić built tension in both works, attending to dynamics and stressing the flow of ideas where he could. In the “concerto,” this produced a structure greater than the sum of three perilously disparate movements and gave his unassuming violin soloist, Henry Raudales, a basis for tracing the rhapsodic lines assertively as well as ethereally, even if the church space somewhat diffused the instrument’s sound.

In the Duruflé, it meant a bold performance grounded in lyrical contrasts and vying choral and orchestral assertions. The BR Chor served the divine rhetoric with verbal clarity and sure intonation. The MRO strings played passionately (for the concerto too), the brass gloriously. Max Hanft managed the demanding organ part with aplomb despite his equipment’s relatively muted colors. Mezzo-soprano Okka von der Damerau applied her magnificent voice to the Pie Jesu but, alas, conveyed little of its meaning. Ljubomir Puškarić’s firm and focused baritone, on the other hand, found a wealth of plaintive expression in his brief solo duties.

[*One downside of the haste is that he is not fully available for his debut season, as announced at a Pressekonferenz April 26 to formally introduce him. Only five Repušić concerts are slated in Munich for 2017–18: another gala, a family program of symphonic dances, a concert performance of Luisa Miller, and two Paradisi gloria programs. The church plans, in a series created by Marcello Viotti, continue the Respighi-Duruflé eclecticism: Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols and Variations on God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, together with Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms; and a pairing of Kodály’s Psalmus hungaricus with his Budavári Te Deum, sung by the Hungarian Radio Choir, no less. Separately at the conference, the MRO’s new website was launched and we learned some trivia: the orchestra is 32% women; the longest service among active members is 41 years; the mean age is 44; and the oldest played instrument was made 312 years ago. Schirmer, absent, received a warm round of applause from the 100 or so assembled journalists for his eleven years of MRO work.]

Photo © Künstleragentur Seifert

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BR Chor’s Humorless Rossini

Saturday, November 2nd, 2013

Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 2, 2013

MUNICH — Can music be sincere and ironic at the same time? Ask Peter Dijkstra, the artistic leader of the BR Chor who last weekend (Oct. 26) led Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle as billed. Solemnly. The result sounded not much like Rossini. Nobody smiled, and the musicians looked tense on the stage of the Prinz-Regenten-Theater, even as they sang and played expertly.

But perhaps the composer was smiling, wherever he is. The famously social 71-year-old used the tuneful giddy Mass — his only complete setting of the Ordinary — to demand admission to Paradise, describing for God its ingredients: “[un] peu de science, un peu de coeur.” The year was 1863 and Paris was digesting Darwin’s De l’origine des espèces, ou Des lois du progrès chez les êtres organizés, in its first French edition. Rossini may have viewed his demand as only natural. Ditto his casting stipulation: “chanteurs des trois sexes – hommes, femmes et castrats.”

If Dijkstra’s straight face precluded irony, and with it a few musical plaisanteries, at least he secured a tidy performance. His choristers, forty strong, mustered volume sparingly, reveling most of the time in transparent textures, soft floated tones and expressive accents. The evening burst into life in their spry counterpoint for Cum Sancto Spiritu, but choral virtuosity was just as apparent in Rossini’s contrasted, wistful Sanctus.

BR Chor members could have been assigned as quartet soloists, as the composer planned. Instead, BR (Bayerischer Rundfunk) hired glamorous outsiders. Regula Mühlemann and (mezzo-soprano) Anke Vondung paired exquisitely in the soprano and alto duet Qui tollis peccata mundi. Mühlemann’s sweet, light sound and the charm of her phrasing added luster to the Thomas Aquinas hymn, O salutaris hostia, interpolated after the Sanctus by Rossini (in 1867) to press musically his case for an agreeable afterlife. Vondung attuned herself to all colleagues, singing with dynamic sensitivity and great poise. She even adjusted neatly to the sudden weight of the Agnus Dei, pleading earnestly for mercy and peace against the score’s quirky aura of melodrama.

Eric Cutler and (baritone) Michael Volle made heavy work of the tenor and bass solo parts. Cutler, alarmingly, bellowed through the Domine Deus, but he brought finesse to the ensembles. Performing on a break from a run of Les vêpres siciliennes in London, Volle brightly characterized his words.

Mordant musical wit in the Petite messe solennelle mirrors Rossini’s droll remarks in its dédicace to God and on the manuscript’s flyleaf. In a skillful reading, particularly one using the original scoring for two pianos and harmonium, as on this occasion, a thread of humor helps link the incongruous styles and moods of the individual sections, ranging as they do from jaunty to buffo to melodramatic to properly solemn.

Dijkstra erred anyway on the side of objectivity, also slowness, and passive accompaniment from the duo pianists belabored his approach. Andreas Groethuysen (principal) and Yaara Tal (second piano) hovered below the music’s surface much of the time. The bubbly rhythmic figurations in the Kyrie passed by unremarkably. The instrumental Offertorio, waggishly labeled Prélude religieux lest anyone find it misplaced, lacked shape and in fact dragged. Groethuysen faltered technically now and then as well.

In a nod to the Verdi bicentennial, Dijkstra began the concert with the unaccompanied, seldom-heard Pater noster (O Padre nostro che ne’ cieli stai) of 1878, sung mellifluously in clear Italian with restrained power. Here his straightforwardness paid off. (Mariss Jansons is chief conductor of the BR Chor.)

Photo © Johannes Rodach

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