Gewandhaus Chailly Volodos Barbican 23 Oct 13

Gewandhaus, Chailly, Volodos, Barbican 23 Oct 13

Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2, Symphony No. 2

Arcadi Volodos (piano), Riccardo Chailly (cond.), Gewandhausorchester

Expect the unexpected from Riccardo Chailly and the Gewandhausorchester. When they tour, it is usually with core repertoire: Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler – Schumann at a push. But Chailly choses his composers carefully, always focussing on master orchestrators, whose subtle instrumental combinations he explores in depth. A Brahms symphony and concerto cycle might look, on paper, like a safe option, but Chailly ensures a surprise at every turn. He’s addicted to risks, sudden tempo shifts, strange balances, unexpected moments of clam. Not everything works – how could it? – but the result is a new view of Brahms: Classical and lean, but constantly engaging through the kaleidoscope of orchestral details that emerge.

Chailly took another risk in programming together the two most problematic works in the cycle, the rambling Second Piano Concerto with the Second Symphony, the least melodious and least loved of the four. Fortunately, the soloist chosen for the concerto was ideally matched to the work’s many challenges. Arcadi Volodos is a big man. He has the physical heft to put behind the keys for all those densely voiced passages. Despite its length and its heavy orchestration, the work also contains many tender passages, and he was able to excel here too, although seemingly despite himself. Whenever the dynamic dropped, Volodos would lean back from the keyboard and a pained expression would cross his face, as if the restraint caused him physical pain. But, loud or soft, his touch is always exquisite. In the quieter music, he has a tender lyricism, but also a real sense of tonal focus, expertly centring the tone of each note. In the louder music, he really came into his own. The first movement in particular is filled with dense, chordal piano figurations, and Volodos was able to both give these the power they required but also variegate the tone, bringing colour to the chords, and finding play of texture and timbre within the dense voicing. Chailly, of course, did far more than just accompany, and every tutti was sculpted and overtly phrased. Pianist and conductor were clearly in very close sympathy, and even the rapid interchanges between piano and orchestra were subject to Chailly’s unpredictable rubato. Rather than impose a sense of coherency that the work itself lacks, Volodos and Chailly instead treated each movement as a separate entity, each almost a self-contained tone poem. This worked best in the Andante third movement. Here Brahms temporarily puts his symphonic ambitions on hold, and the second half of the long movement is like a daydream, airy and nebulous with no clear progression or aim. But Volodos really made this into a virtue, creating a sense of stillness and rapt hush. And the capacity audience hung on his every note, transfixed by the magical atmosphere.

Chailly has had a long and productive relationship with the Gewandhaus, one that looks set to continue with a recently announced contract extension. The orchestra is the perfect vehicle for his musical ambitions: his interpretations are all about bringing out the salient details of the orchestration, and, while the orchestra functions well as a unified whole, its greatest strength lies in the identity and character of its individual sections. The strings sit on a solid foundation of basses and cellos, whose rich, warm and steady tone is the anchor of the Gewandhaus sound. The upper strings don’t have that velvety richness you’ll hear in Berlin and Vienna, but employ a more sinewy and focussed tone, ideal for Chailly’s attention to line and detail.

From the start of the Second Symphony it was clear that nothing was going to be taken for granted. The main theme of the first movement, on the cellos, was aggressively shaped, with the downbeat accents emphatically emphasised. To a fault? Well, perhaps, a little more cantabile might have helped here. From then on Chailly always seemed to be looking in the last place you’d expect, to the flutes during the second subject to bring out their (usually subsumed) counterpoint, even to the seconds (seated right) in homophonic textures where their contribution seemed of little interest. Then there were the sudden changes of tempo and texture between sections, disorientating in the short term, but in the long term clearly part of a logical plan. It was very impressive to hear the orchestra always snap to Chailly’s new tempo, colour and dynamic; these might seem like surprises to us, but clearly not to them. The tuttis were the most revelatory aspect of this performance; plenty of power here, and often real exhilaration. But Chailly and his players also manage to retain that focus on the details, even in the loudest and fastest passages. The finale began poorly, the trumpets to blame I think, but soon picked up. No autopilot here from Chailly, of course, and each of the interludes in the rondo structure signalled a brief visit to some distant sound world. But the coda was ideal: propulsive, focussed, and made all the more exhilarating for the details of the orchestration that shone through. And for an encore? Brahms of course, his Fifth Hungarian Dance. Here at last a work where Chailly’s radical tempos interventions were fully justified. And he didn’t hold back - or rather he did, at the end of every phrase. But as in the finale of the symphony, Chailly conjured a colourful and propulsive climax here, made all the more beguiling by the myriad orchestral details still shining through. Fabulous!

Chailly Gewandhaus Beethoven Barbican 1 November 2011

  Matthews, Beethoven: Gewandhaus Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly (conductor), Barbican Hall, London, 1.11.11 (Gdn)

Colin Matthews: Grand Barcarolle

Beethoven: Symphony no.8

Beethoven: Symphony no.3

Riccardo Chailly and the Gewandhaus Orchestra are one of the great musical collaborations of our time. That's hardly a contentious view, but working out exactly why their chemistry works is surprisingly tricky. There is definitely an element of contrast in the relationship between his passionate Italian approach and the orchestra's Germanic discipline. Chailly clearly exploits the virtuosity of the instrumentalists for his own interpretive ends. But there is obviously a deep mutual respect here, and a shared passion for the core Austro-German repertoire.

Chailly's interpretations are always radical, or at least unconventional. Perhaps the collaboration with the orchestra seems so close because the audience are continually being surprised by the interpretive decisions, while the players are always in on his ideas. And while Chailly likes to do things differently, he rarely takes the music to extremes. These performances were characterised by continuous intensity, and there were surprisingly few pianissimos or moments of respite of any sort. Sometimes that can feel excessive, especially when each movement is presented as a self-sufficient dramatic entity. But we hadn't come for background music, and Chailly ensured that every phrase was taken seriously, clearly articulated and allowed to sink in.

The orchestra's playing really is something special. There is a deep beauty to their every note, but it's not a ravishing beauty, rather an angular Teutonic beauty. The strings have astonishing unity of ensemble. They are able to play with that rich, chocolatey sound you only get in Berlin, Leipzig and Vienna. But they are also able to turn that off, switching instead to a big, strident tone or a more focussed, nasal sound. Among the woodwinds, the bassoons excelled in the 8^th symphony, while the oboe soloist was star of the 3^rd. All the players bar the strings are playing instruments that you hardly ever meet on this side of Europe, so their distinctive timbre is at least partly a product of their technology.

Grand Barcarolle by Colin Matthews is one of a series of works commissioned by Chailly to accompany the orchestra's Beethoven cycle. On one level, the commissioning project seems hopelessly outdated: composers expected to justify their presence on orchestral programmes by presenting creative responses to the core repertoire in the second half. That sort of postmodernism has been going on at least since Berio and Schnittke in the 1970s, and there really isn't much more to say. Colin Matthews' response to Beethoven is, by his own admission, closer to Mahler. And it doesn't even sound like a postmodern response to Mahler, it just sounds like Mahler. But it fitted well into this programme, because Chailly's Beethoven is, in many ways, deeply Mahlerian. Had Matthews' work preceded anybody else's Beethoven it wouldn't have worked at all. But here it fit beautifully. And given the ability of this orchestra to imbue late Romantic textures with depths of colour and emotion, it would seem a waste to write anything else for them.

In London, long the capital of period performance orchestral playing, Chailly's Beethoven seems almost reactionary. It is as if he is reclaiming Beethoven's scores from the period instrument brigade. It probably doesn't seem that way in Leipzig, but even mainstream London orchestras tend to pay some kind of lip service to the period performance conventions: reducing the string sections, using natural trumpets, minimal vibrato etc. Chailly makes a big thing of his loyalty to the what he finds in the score, particularly the dynamics, articulations and metronome marks. But the result seems more loyal to the spirit of the music than to the letter.

In the 8^th Symphony it works a treat. He makes no excuses for the curious structure of the work and whips up a storm in every movement. When the first two movements each stop abruptly without warning or explanation, Chailly is happy to place the blame squarely at the composer's feet. And for the rest of the time he enjoys the moment. The first movement is a propulsive and dance-like as that of the 7^th, while the finale has the gravitas and power of the 5^th's conclusion. The 8^th worked better than the 3^rd, and the many interpretive problems that the 8th presents seem to inspire Chailly's interpretive ideas, with more exciting and more convincing results.

But the 3^rd was great too. Those punch chords at the very opening were clean and decisive, and there were plenty of other places in the first movement when ideas like that could appear out of the texture, a surprise each time, even when you know they are coming. Chailly doesn't let the music just play itself, and his tempo interventions can be sudden and counter-intuitive. But they always fit into the logic of his interpretation, and needless to say they never take the orchestra by surprise. The funeral march was astonishingly intense, this is where the solo oboe came into his own. The scherzo suffered slightly from the intensity of the two movements that preceded it: a higher level of energy and intensity were required of it, and it only just managed. And the finale was great. It occasionally approached a Brucknerian intensity towards the end. That's the real advantage of this sort of modern instrument approach, that intensity at the climaxes. But you need an orchestra who can maintain the ensemble and tonal control, even at the end of an intense concert. Not a problem, of course, for the Gewandhaus.

The great thing about the Chailly/Gewandhaus partnership is that the standard of their musicmaking transcends any problems you might have about interpretive issues. Chailly does take liberties sometimes. Using the two sticks of the timpani together in the second movement of the Eroica for example. Is that in the score? I'm sure it's not. And the many abrupt tempo changes that, on the face of it, work against the logic of the music. But these musicians create their own logic. It's emotional and intense and its just as good as Beethoven's.

Gavin Dixon