Posts Tagged ‘Münchner Philharmoniker’

Bumps and Bychkov at MPhil

Thursday, June 25th, 2015

Semyon Bychkov in 2013 in London

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 25, 2015

MUNICH — 2014–15 has been a rough transitional season for the Munich Philharmonic. Lorin Maazel’s sudden resignation a year ago forced its managers into much recasting, and some feeble programs. Then, midseason, came worse news. An irksome pact between Munich’s Bürgermeister Dieter Reiter and Bavaria’s Minister-Präsident Horst Seehofer nixed plans for a needed new concert hall to replace the Gasteig and instead envisioned a joyously slow disemboweling and inner rearrangement of that acoustically poor facility, which would leave the MPhil homeless starting in 2020. The pact sent Anne-Sophie Mutter, Christian Gerhaher and Mariss Jansons into public displays of betrayal, rage and frustration, respectively. But MPhil managers could not whine so loudly because the city owns the orchestra, so, a week behind everyone else, including the testy Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (also affected), they emitted six splendid bureaucratic paragraphs saying absolutely nothing.

Somehow the musicians have ploughed through this temporum horribilis and on Monday (June 22) managed to sound confident and poised at the Gasteig under Semyon Bychkov. Grandly he propelled them in Brahms’s Third Symphony (1883) stressing contrasts and drama with wide arm gestures. Fine wind contributions, not least from principal horn Jörg Brückner, flattered the score’s textures, and Bychkov took a pleasingly weighty and leisurely approach to the middle movements, observing dynamic markings with care. Ravel’s G-Major Piano Concerto (1931) after the break found everyone on less sure footing, however, despite this being the program’s third iteration. Jean-Yves Thibaudet gave a dull, woolly account of the solo part. Ensemble weakened. The long concert remained in French mode for its conclusion, Debussy’s La Mer (1905), but this listener had to run.

Tomorrow, the same partnership performs in the Pala de Andrè as a guest of the Ravenna Festival. MPhil 2014–15 closes fully with concerts here led by Kent Nagano and Krzysztof Urbański, but in September more headaches loom when Valery Gergiev takes over as Chefdirigent. Systems are supposedly in place to prevent the skimpiness of preparation associated with the new boss. It is unclear what, if any, measures are in place to cope with the political challenge.

Photo © Chris Christodoulou

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Gergiev Prep Hours Clarified

Friday, March 13th, 2015

Munich Philharmonic basses

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: March 13, 2015

MUNICH — This morning the Munich Philharmonic detailed the rehearsal hours put in by Valery Gergiev for a Stravinsky program here in December 2013. They totaled 14¼, a lavish allocation by the heavily branded maestro given his skimpy work in Poland and Russia the same week, to wit:

     Dec. 11, 2013 — day of “unexpected circumstances”
     Dec. 12, 2013 — Warsaw: sole local Gergiev rehearsal for Iolanta and A kékszakállú herceg vára, postponed by a day
     Dec. 13, 2013 — Warsaw: opening night of Tchaikovsky-Bartók double bill
     Dec. 14, 2013 — flight to St Petersburg; evening: Verdi Requiem
     Dec. 15, 2013 — St Petersburg: La traviata
     Dec. 16, 2013 — flight to Munich; late afternoon: 5¾ hours rehearsing Stravinsky
     Dec. 17, 2013 — morning: 6 hours of rehearsals; afternoon: news conference about pedophilia, Putin, and so on
     Dec. 18, 2013 — morning: 2½ hours of rehearsals; evening: Stravinsky concert

The rehearsal details, a response to a question last year, arrived after a vague outline from the orchestra of its quantitative expectations of Gergiev. Late this month the MPhil will announce its first season with the Russian conductor as Chefdirigent, and in May an ad hoc conference is promised at which he will reveal his long-term Ideen, Ziele und Projekte for Munich.

Photo © Wild und Leise

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MPhil Vague on Gergiev Hours

Tuesday, February 24th, 2015

Valery Gergiev

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: February 24, 2015

MUNICH — Fourteen months ago irate journalists confronted Valery Gergiev at a news conference here amid his preparations for a Stravinsky program with the Munich Philharmonic. The confrontation wasn’t over music, rather politics, but it did lead to questions for the orchestra’s management about his hours and pay, made more pertinent when the Stravinsky proved artistically hollow and the conductor’s rehearsing habits became better known in this city. Management demurred, until now, just ahead of the announcement of Gergiev’s first season (2015–16) as MPhil Chefdirigent.

— How many hours of rehearsal took place for the [Dec. 18, 2013] Stravinsky program? How many were with Gergiev?

MPhil: No answer.

— What does the MPhil normally expect of a guest conductor, in number of days with the musicians and number of rehearsals?

— What is expected of any MPhil Chefdirigent as regards: physical presence in Munich; number of weeks of concerts per year; rehearsals; behavior or ambassadorship, including guest conducting, while away from Munich?

MPhil: Valery Gergiev has in the past as guest conductor rehearsed to the same measure and extent as all chief and guest conductors of recent years. At this unchanged intensity will he rehearse in his role as Chefdirigent from September 2015. [The number of weeks of concerts will not be detailed until the 2015–16 announcement] but will be in the same measure as for all other chief conductors. This applies to both Munich and tour concerts.

We have talked with him about the currently practiced quantitative framework (das bisher praktizierte Mengengerüst), a basis that ensures that he and the orchestra can collaborate artistically at the highest level.

Despite the Russian conductor’s future status as a City of Munich employee, the city-run Munich Philharmonic has refused to disclose the value of his contract, which runs as far ahead as August 2020. Says the MPhil, apparently overlooking their different status, “all guest conductors and soloists are treated exactly the same way,” i.e. with remuneration kept confidential. The contrast with the U.S. could not be starker: while Riccardo Muti’s mostly privately funded pay in Chicago, as example, is publicly stated, Gergiev’s earnings, paid essentially from public funds, are private.

Photo © Alexander Shapunov

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MPhil Vacuum: Maazel Out

Thursday, June 12th, 2014

Lorin Maazel

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 12, 2014

MUNICH — Lorin Maazel, 84, has quit the post of Chefdirigent of the Munich Philharmonic, according to a statement this morning by this city’s Kulturreferat, the government entity responsible for the orchestra. Reasons of health were cited. The news follows several weeks of concert cancellations by the American maestro, who is at present in Virginia. No plans were immediately revealed for the many affected conducting slots in the remainder of what was an agreed three-year tenure through August 2015.

The abandonment leaves MPhil authorities with more egg on their faces. Their rift with Christian Thielemann, causing the revered German conductor’s departure as Generalmusikdirektor in 2011, remains a matter of dismay and irritation for many in this community, and their controversial hire of Valery Gergiev as Maazel’s successor for five seasons, to 2020, has already brought embarrassment. Maazel’s interregnum, as he himself saw it, was supposed to be something of a safe bet.

Photo © Wild und Leise

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Gergiev Undissuaded

Tuesday, May 20th, 2014

Valery Gergiev at Munich Rathaus in 2013

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: May 20, 2014

MUNICH — In a rambling, two-page “personal statement” to Munich Philharmonic subscribers made public today (May 20), Valery Gergiev stressed the role of music as bridge-builder and affirmed his now divisive assumption of the post of Chefdirigent of the orchestra, effective in fall 2015.

The statement covers a grab bag of topics, from Realpolitik to the Russian Orthodox faith, from Mariinsky Theater duties to a Munich Stravinsky cycle, from Glinka’s Europeanization of Russian music to recent Ukraine “events.” Coyly, it acknowledges that “future political developments could give rise to problems.”

One bizarre paragraph refers to the Russian people’s continuing support for “taboos that have not applied in Western countries for many years,” presumably a reference to non-advances in human rights. “With respect to my personal stance,” it states, “there is no one in my ensemble and team who could accuse me of anything. One of my most important principles is respect for others and their personal lives.”

This effort by Gergiev was in part an outcome of a politically forced meeting he had with the orchestra’s Intendant Paul Müller and the City of Munich’s Kulturreferent Hans-Georg Küppers three days ago (May 17) in Linz during a Mariinsky Orchestra visit to Austria. The encounter had been expected to take place in Munich late this week when the touring Russians arrive here, and it may have been moved up (and away) to refract attention.

Photo © 2013 Wild und Leise

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Honeck Honors Strauss

Friday, April 11th, 2014

Manfred Honeck

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 11, 2014

MUNICH — Watching Manfred Honeck lead the Munich Philharmonic in Strauss last Sunday (April 6), a question came to mind. Why isn’t this the man replacing Lorin Maazel next year?

With refreshing conviction and broad arm gestures à la Carlos Kleiber, Honeck drew polished performances from the orchestra in three contrasted scores; the horns played dazzlingly. He waltzed with shrewd abandon through the 1944 Rosenkavalier-Suite, injecting drama and nailing Artur Rodziński’s (or is it really Strauss’s?) hearty coda. He elegantly accompanied in the Vier letzte Lieder (1948) as Anja Harteros painted the words and sent ravishing soprano tones around the acoustically deficient Gasteig hall. Perfect flute trills graced Im Abendrot. If her consonants did not always project, blame the architect. After the break, the Pittsburgh-based conductor richly indulged the melodies of Ein Heldenleben (1898), a work he played in Vienna under Kleiber 21 years ago, and he managed its counterpoint to gripping effect. Sreten Krstič’s sweet and poised but light-bodied solo violin fit in neatly. The MPhil will repeat the program tomorrow in New York, where Fabio Luisi conducts.

Photo © Felix Broede

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Gergiev, Munich’s Mistake

Wednesday, April 9th, 2014

Valery Gergiev signs contract at Astana Opera in April 2014

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 9, 2014

MUNICH — Not a week goes by here now without media mention of Valery Gergiev. The musical friend of Vladimir Putin and, more to the point, high-profile employee-to-be of the City of Munich inspires comment even in modest suburban newspapers. Many want his alarmingly long contract (2015–20) shredded.

But the Russian maestro was already a rotten choice as Chefdirigent of the tax-payer-funded, city-run Munich Philharmonic before Putin upset Pink List politicians over human rights and the Green Party over Crimea.

His repertory limitations, his work habits and his first loyalties all portend a discordant, creatively stunted tenure during which Munich, despite its €800,000-a-year* wage, has no hope of being the artist’s top priority. If not shredded, the contract of Feb. 2013 should certainly be adjusted.

Gergiev is globally known from his base at St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, where he operates a network of répétiteurs and conducting assistants who extend brand “Gergiev” beyond the physical and temporal limits of one person.

Seven days ago, for instance, he entered a principal guest conductor agreement (pictured) with Astana Opera, the expensively housed company of Nursultan Nazarbayev in the flat and flashy Kazakh capital.

Munich’s old and Astana’s new money follows Gergiev earnings at the London Symphony Orchestra, where his stint as principal conductor (2007–15) resembles good preparation for the job here.

But London’s one-night, one-program pattern suits the Russian’s lickety-split scheduling better than Munich’s (American-style) weekly program iterations. Example: he is this week able to dart to New York for a Strauss concert between two different LSO Scriabin programs three days apart.

As one MPhil insider earnestly phrased it last December, peripatetic Gergiev “must reinvent himself” so that he can stay in one place, with one program and one group of musicians, for a whole workweek, build partnerships through rehearsals he himself leads, and mine the interpretive depths.

Good luck with that. And the reinventing would need to extend to repertory: Munich concertgoers enjoy their Slavic diversions but expect passionate leadership in Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner. Alas, in 25 years as a star, Gergiev has acquired no reputation in these composers. Ditto for Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn.

“It’s political,” everyone says, when asked why Gergiev was chosen. They mean he was chosen by city politicians — not friends of Putin, of course, but people whose collective knowledge and consensus thinking permit little beyond the purchase of a big name, which Gergiev undeniably is.

In their wisdom, in 2009, they “lost” the MPhil’s hot-property Generalmusikdirektor Christian Thielemann, and followed up in 2010 by replacing him with the jaded Lorin Maazel (for 2012–15). Decline has followed.

The politicians do not decide unaided, however. A consulting board called the Philharmonische Rat liaises between the orchestra’s Intendant Paul Müller and Munich’s city council, which approves budgets and major contracts. The Rat includes councilors, orchestra members, Müller, and Hans-Georg Küppers, the city’s Kulturreferent. If nothing else, processes are peaceful. The recent difficulties in Minneapolis and San Diego cannot be imagined here.

Ironically, while Rat members can speak freely, Gergiev is expected to constrain his speech — not weigh in on matters like Crimea that needn’t concern a Moscow-born Ossetian based in St Petersburg — and acquire the diplomatic tact of a City of Munich employee, a world-roaming cultural ambassador whose every move and view will reflect on Munich, Bavaria and Germany.

Predictably he hasn’t. By hailing the Crimea change, even in his current status as an MPhil guest, he may have done more to curtail his Munich future than any problem of scheduling or repertory weakness could have.

The Green Party on Mar. 27 forced instructions to Küppers and Müller: chat with the maestro during his next visit, bitte, and illuminate the boundary between free speech and employee discretion.

They can try. Gergiev is in town next month with his beloved Mariinsky Orchestra. More productive, though, would be a chat that dilutes the publicly signed Chefdirigent deal into a guesting plan like Astana’s. Time remains on Maazel’s contract to research and court a more suitable replacement, allowing Gergiev to remain Gergiev, and Munich to savor the scores he leads best. Without the negative attention.

[*The salary reportedly paid to Christian Thielemann, whose title indicated a slightly loftier position. The incumbent, Lorin Maazel, is Chefdirigent, as was James Levine before Thielemann.]

Photo © Astana Opera

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Tuesday, April 1st, 2014

Valery Gergiev

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 1, 2014

MUNICH — In every book on time management, there is a chapter about giving your work to someone else. Delegation, they say, is a virtue: an assistant exercises new authority and the delegator accomplishes other tasks, perhaps in other places. Maybe in another country. Or two.

Take Valery Gergiev, incoming Chefdirigent of the Munich Philharmonic. He delegates like a pro, arming répétiteurs and conducting assistants — many of them from St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater — with preparatory guidelines to deliver “Gergiev” interpretations on a minimum of Gergiev time. This way, the Russian’s branded, in-person artistry reaches more audiences in more cities. Call it the productization of conducting.

Last December, leading up to and including an MPhil program here, Gergiev conducted a choral concert, three operas, and four Stravinsky works, with three different orchestras in three countries, all in one week.

It was quite a feat. It was also, inevitably, a week of headaches, as the controlling artist jumped between scores on a near-daily basis. Featured: a postponement, a cancellation, anxious last-minute rehearsing, an opera company’s embarrassment, and, in Munich at least, shallow musical results.

The conductor’s devotion to the weightiest project of the week, in Warsaw, offers a clue about how much of what audiences hear in a “Gergiev” performance reflects his work.

Teatr Wielki had hired the Moscow-born conductor for a new production of a Tchaikovsky-Bartók double bill premiering on Dec. 13. Directed by Mariusz Treliński, the film noir versions of Iolanta and A kékszakállú herceg vára were a joint venture with the Metropolitan Opera, where they arrive next January under Guess Who’s baton.

The assignment came with hurdles, given that the opera company’s orchestra was little accustomed to Gergiev’s ways, the principal singers were mostly new to their roles, the compositional styles of the two pieces were unrelated, and the bill involved the Russian and Hungarian languages in performance by mostly Polish musicians.

All this considered, not delegating might have seemed the better part of valor. Indeed, if hearsay is accurate, the week was originally planned at a slightly less frenetic level of activity: just the Warsaw double bill and (on Dec. 18) the Stravinsky pieces in Munich.

The parties understood that of the Warsaw rehearsals Gergiev would lead only the final dress, on Dec. 11. Beyond the premiere, the hearsay has it that he was also to conduct the second performance, on Dec. 15, before heading to Munich. For the remaining dates of the brief run, Dec. 17 and 19, the Poles had engaged a second maestro, young Bassem Akiki.

The hearsay is credible because the non-updated website of Akiki, as recently as today (April 1, 2014), lists the two dates alone, and, when asked about the original slate for Dec. 15, Teatr Wielki did not deny the suggestion that the Russian conductor was at first scheduled.

But Gergiev gave Warsaw much less of himself even than this modest arrangement (Dec. 11, 13 and 15), and in Munich he appeared tired, possibly weakening the Dec. 18 concert. He conducted Teatr Wielki’s Dec. 13 premiere, and he flew to Munich on Dec. 16 to prepare the Stravinsky, only not from Warsaw.

“Unexpected circumstances did not allow maestro Gergiev to lead” the final dress rehearsal on Dec. 11, stated Teatr Wielki in an email response to questions (confirming a separate part of the hearsay), and so it was postponed to Dec. 12, when Gergiev was available. Besides distress for the cast, this change, according to the hearsay at least, caused the cancellation of an unrelated concert on Dec. 12.

The cast affected was: Tatiana Monogarova as Iolanta, Sergei Skorokhodov as Vodyemon, Mikolaj Zalasiński as Robyert, Alexei Tanovitski as Ryenye, Nadja Michael as Judit, and Gidon Saks as Kékszakállú.

“It is absolutely not customary for Teatr Wielki to schedule dress rehearsals one day before a premiere,” wrote the company.

Nor did Gergiev conduct the second performance of Treliński’s double bill. That fell to Akiki, even as company managers were trumpeting the participation of the celebrated conductor.

Instead he bolted, apparently with permission, for St Petersburg and rapid-switch programs at his own Mariinsky Theater: on Dec. 14 the Verdi Requiem and on Dec. 15 La traviata, both necessarily rehearsed by other hands. It was from the Russian city that he flew here.

Warsaw’s astoundingly patient company provided context for Gergiev’s arrangement, pointing out that “the process of rehearsing” (before the final dress) was the responsibility of a Gergiev assistant who “was in constant contact with” the boss. And, in a sign that any change of plan had been agreed: “Maestro Gergiev fulfilled his duties for Teatr Wielki.”

Meanwhile in Munich, normally communicative spokespeople grew taciturn, conceivably out of embarrassment about what they sensed was artistic dissemblance. Still unanswered by the publicly run MPhil are these easy questions:

— How many hours of rehearsal took place for the Dec. 18 Stravinsky program? How many were with Gergiev?

— What does the MPhil normally expect of a guest conductor, in number of days with the musicians and number of rehearsals?

Then again, the Munich Philharmonic has a long stake in this conductor (until 2020) and a bigger problem. He has become hot-to-handle due to his support for Vladimir Putin and his seeming confusion of homosexuality with pedophilia. On Dec. 17, amid Stravinsky rehearsals, he was grappling with testy questions at a news conference about these matters.

And the Dec. 18 Stravinsky concert? It brought fine musicianship with more than a hint of interpretive emptiness. Being a guest here, Gergiev can get away with such perceptions of disengagement, but he must steel himself for heightened subscriber scrutiny once he takes over.

Photo © Alexander Shapunov

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Stravinsky On Autopilot

Thursday, March 27th, 2014

Members of the Munich Philharmonic at work

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: March 27, 2014

MUNICH — In eight days in May 2004, as a kind of audition for the post of principal conductor, Valery Gergiev drove the London Symphony Orchestra brilliantly, if roughly, through recorded concerts of all of Prokofiev’s symphonies. Acclaim ensued, he got the job, and two years later the hasty, also electrifying and poignant, cycle rolled out on Philips CDs.

Now that Gergiev is headed here as Chefdirigent of the Munich Philharmonic, his attention is on Stravinsky. Only this time he already has the job, from Sept. 2015. And while Gergiev can be effective in this composer’s music too, he isn’t always, as Sedgwick Clark recently noted.

Munich’s Stravinsky cycle, if that is what it turns out to be, got off to a sad start Dec. 18. On the program, at the orchestra’s crooked Gasteig home, four French-name works: L’oiseau de feu (1910), Symphonies d’instruments à vent (1920), and the cantatas Le roi des étoiles (1912) and Les noces (1923).

Technically it was a good night. The orchestra and the pianists played well, the singing had discipline. Microphones presumably were turned on.

Artistically, though, nothing much happened, above all in the popular ballet score, which coasted vacantly and sounded headless, as if the orchestra members had crafted an interpretation by themselves.

The inspired Les noces should have been a treat, with four Mariinsky singers on hand (soprano Irina Vasilieva, mezzo-soprano Olga Savova, tenor Alexander Timchenko and bass Ilya Bannik), but Gergiev operated merely as traffic cop. Visceral bite in the score counted for little, despite robust contributions from Vasilieva and Savova and the energy of pianists Sergei Babayan, Dmitri Levkovich, Marina Radiushina and Andrius Zlabys, plus able percussionists. Adding to the woe, the cantata’s torrent of words blurred in the wide, fan-shaped auditorium.

Although perfectly intoned, the Symphonies suffered from blunting of essential rhythmic impulses. Only the brief King of the Stars (Звездоликий, actually Star Face) brought satisfaction, its alien harmonies and odd temporal properties carefully managed.

But who knows? Recordings may paint a more enthralling, or at any rate clearer, picture of this first regular-program collaboration of the Munich Philharmonic and the boss-to-be since the January 2013 announcement of his hire. And there is always hope for the cycle’s second installment.

The concert, not incidentally, was beset by unnerving circumstance. A testy news conference the previous afternoon (Dec. 17); a human rights protest in the form of a Putin-Gergiev pantomime on the Gasteig’s forecourt, watched by hundreds of arriving concertgoers; the unrealized menace of heckling during the music; daytime pressure from City of Munich politicians; and, not least, a week of frenzy for the maestro before he even landed here — all amount to another discussion.

Photo © Wild und Leise

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On Wenlock Edge with MPhil

Thursday, January 9th, 2014

Wenlock Edge in Shropshire, England

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: January 9, 2014

MUNICH — Sullen, virile, often disembodied voices speak bluntly in Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge (1909). They are lost and living British Empire soldiers. Their plights, in six Housman texts, shape the 22-minute song cycle and its mildly chromatic “atmospheric effects,” resulting in music of stimulating directness — and French touches: counsel from Ravel pushed VW past expressive block in setting the words and precedent of Fauré helped determine the choice of tenor and piano quintet scoring.

This inimitable work is, inevitably, awkward to program, but musicians of the Munich Philharmonic found a way Dec. 15 on one of their nine intrepid Kammerkonzerte this season in the red and gold finery of the Künstlerhaus here on Lenbachplatz, drafting pianist Paul Rivinius and tenor Mark Padmore (who recorded On Wenlock Edge in 2007 and again this year). Songs by Britten and Ravel and the French composer’s F-Major String Quartet (1903) offered context.

The long Shropshire cliff of Vaughan Williams’s title is swept with a storm in the first song, as the speaker imagines himself in the steps of a Roman warrior. Padmore (52) hurled his lyric tenor into the maelstrom of sound here, buffeted but not trounced by the accompaniment. For Is My Team Ploughing? he deployed sweet head tones and dark shadings to sketch two soldier friends, one of them dead, conversing about shared work and a shared girl. The seven-stanza fifth song, Bredon Hill, provides backbone for the cycle, lamenting a fiancée’s death against the illusory background of Worcestershire church bells. Padmore traced its lines with somber resignation.

Julian Shevlin, Simon Fordham, Julia Rebekka Adler and Sissy Schmidhuber mustered tight ensemble in the Ravel quartet. Like dedicated chamber musicians, they had evidently established a mutual view of the score and were able to realize its tricky harmonies and shifting tone colors while throwing measured amounts of light on its textures. The wandering and somewhat Debussian third movement, Très lent, had more shape than is usual, without loss of refinement, and the concluding Vif et agité came across as marked. (One of the orchestra’s three concertmasters, Shevlin gave an eloquent account of Walton’s Violin Concerto nineteen months ago when Ivor Bolton conducted.)

Each half of the concert opened with a song cycle: Britten’s ample Winter Words (1953) and Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques (1906). Though not quite warmed up for the Britten, Padmore made wily use of top notes and his gift for floating a phrase, lighting the words with imagination. His timbre in this music turned coarse when pressured, however, and he applied pressure often. The mélodies found him just as effective in French. Rivinius played with lively confidence, an equal partner.

This annual Sunday matinée concert series began in 2007 during Christian Thielemann’s tenure as Generalmusikdirektor. Initially held at the Jewish Museum, the events were relocated for better acoustics four seasons ago. The musicians themselves choose the programs, eyeing adventure: Rezsö Kókai’s Quartettino and Franz Krommer’s B-flat Bassoon Quartet, for instance, feature at a concert next month. Silvia Hauer and Anja Harteros, at other Munich Philharmonic Kammerkonzerte this season, will sing music for voice and ensemble: Hindemith’s Unheimliche Aufforderung, Fauré’s cycle La bonne chanson and Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle — the last two scored, like On Wenlock Edge, for piano quintet accompaniment.

Photo © Paul Hodgkinson

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