2023-05-25 21:12:01
The musical program given by Jonathan Nott and the Orchester de la Suisse Romande on Wednesday evening at the Victoria Hall in Geneva – and resumed on Thursday – nonchalantly juxtaposed a contemporary creation and Richard Strauss. No need to want to build bridges between Shadows III, Concerto for string quartet and orchestra by the French composer Yann Robin (born in 1974) and the Dance of the Seven Veils of Salome as well as the twilights Four last Songs Strauss.
Welcomed by a concert of bravos and boos, Yann Robin’s contemporary piece intrigues without frankly convincing. Her Concerto for string quartet and orchestra is a large noisy body, an experimental score that uses playing styles reminiscent at times of the “concrete instrumental music” of Helmut Lachenmann. There pass the shadows ofThus spoke zarathustra of Strauss (in the first bars), of Pacific 231 of Arthur Honegger (for the motor side) and of Rite of Spring of Stravinsky (the great disruptive bursts).
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Frenzied bustle
For the rest, we are in a typically contemporary language where streaked and hatched gestures pile up, rhythmic cells in repetition, bursts of notes, rough and crunching sounds, passing through phases of intensification and dull magma, all punctuated by powerful explosions similar to sound eruptions. If the first pages interest us by the treatment of a looping melodic-rhythmic cell, soon the structure seems to relax… The dramaturgy runs out of steam in a frenetic agitation and incessant convulsions. The catalog of effects is exhausted in a back and forth which dilutes the sound substance. Too long, too repetitive.
We salute the technical performance of the Tana Quartet, very committed, and we will forgive Jonathan Nott for having lost his way at a given moment in the score to interrupt it and resume it immediately following having said a few words to the public (some music lovers have thought that “it was part of the music”!). The OSR, all desks combined, is confronted with a difficult musical language.
Songs lacking transcendence
After the intermission, Jonathan Nott grabs the Dance of the Seven Veils of Salome by Strauss. The wild and lecherous part of the score is well highlighted, with the haunting side of the dance – even if all this lacks a bit of finesse. THE Four last Songs by Strauss conclude the evening without the expected share of transcendence. The Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian presents a very beautiful timbre, ample and fleshy. The vocal means are there; we admire the homogeneity of the bass to the treble, the conduct of the vocal lines, the plasticity, but the emotion is not quite there.
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We regret that the diction in German is insufficient. Jonathan Nott lets the orchestra pour out in poisonous colors without sufficiently channeling the forces present. Suddenly, Asmik Grigorian must clear a path – and make his voice float – in the middle of an accompaniment that is too pregnant and dense. We would like a canvas of more delicate and spidery colors. The first violin Vlad Stanculeasa plays his solos remarkably. This interpretation lacks a twilight dimension, the very one that makes this music so sovereign and disarming.
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