It’s Grieg to Them
By BLC ©2007
“A Gala Concert in Celebration of Edvard Grieg’s Centennial.” Marcus Paus: Two Lyrical Pieces — Rolf Wallin: Ground for Cello and String Orchestra (1996); music by Grieg and Johan Svendsen. Darrett Adkins, cello soloist; Per Brevig/Grieg Festival Orch. Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, NY, NY. December 9, 2007.
Once again the Grieg Society turned out to be a truly progressive musical organization with two contemporary selections on its program, one of them clearly Grieg-inspired. Mr. Paus’ nine-minute long Two Lyrical Pieces, is subtitled “Hommage a Grieg” and is just as Norwegian-rooted as Grieg’s Lyric Suite or his famous Piano Concerto. The first of the set is a dark and groping but expressive “Elegy,” in which the orchestra, seemingly looking for some sort of anchorage, fashions a chorale-like theme and builds on it until reaching a great climax before fading into oblivion. The one point that comes closest to a display of actual grief comes near the very end when the strings strike a sobbing sul ponticello. It is a brief but effective moment.
The second piece, “Fanitull,” or “Devil’s Tune,” is at once gentle and furious, fashioned largely around a “Grieg motto.” In the space of less than three minutes it whirls a path around the motto and ends almost as suddenly as it began. There is a tale circulating that Marcus Paus, a guitarist, can play more than 400 notes per second. That is of course apocryphal, but “Fanitull” certainly exhibits a penchant for fast tempo. The 30-year old Mr. Paus, responding to the audience’s wild applause, jumped onto the stage afterward, bowing profusely .
Mr. Wallin’s ambitious 18-minute long Ground, musicologically linked to the Baroque form, was a riveting event, especially as performed by Mr. Adkins with an orchestra of 25 strings. The work begins with a lengthy cadenza that strikes the listener as a tribute to the great solo cello works of J.S. Bach, though now unmistakably cast in a contemporary mode. These passages are both daring and sure-footed, certainly requiring virtuosity of the highest order. When the orchestra finally emerges it is in pianissimo and remains very close to that to the very end, while the heroic cellist stays resolutely in command of his restless journey. The orchestra maintains a ghostlike facade, with eerie howls, low trills, tremolandi and other effects, such as the players’ inhaling and then exhaling a soft vocal “whoooooo” at certain points. The final morendo is extraordinarily long, with the last notes coming down to the point of virtual inaudibility, as the cellist finds eternal rest (i.e., “ground”), as the program note so aptly describes the work.
Darrett Adkins, a rising master of the newest musical challenges, was utterly superb. His concentration, so essential for a composition of this breed, with its rigorously structured rhythms, was intense, his counting technique spot-on. While one wishes there was an available recording of the work played by Adkins, we could only locate one with another cellist. Publisher Chester Novello lists Boyl (Aurora: ACD 5011) with cellist Øystein Birkeland and the Norwegian Chamber Orch. The CD contains three other Wallin works and is available on the composer’s website.
The outer selections were the Grieg and the Svendsen. The familiar Grieg, originally incidental music for a play by Ludvig Holberg, offers warm melodies, which remind us all too well of the better days of WQXR when this work could be heard often and positioned comfortably in the brain’s aural memory cells. We were not at all familiar with the Svendsen, a rather large and pithy work compared to the Grieg, written in 1866 and awarded a prize right off. It was just three years after this that Grieg’s famed Piano Concerto was premiered. So Svendsen makes for the perfect companion to Grieg on this occasion, the centennial of Grieg’s death.
This was also our first visit to Zankel Hall, and we found the acoustics quite satisfactory. Maestro Brevig had his mostly youthful players sounding just fine, especially considering the variety of styles required this afternoon.