Concert
re: orchestra (Rotterdam Ensemble)
Manoel Theatre

The International Spring Orchestra Festival, now in its seventh edition, has become an annual fixture in Malta’s musical calendar.

The more playful moments were given their due importance with fine woodwind and brass solos

One of the festival’s defining characteristics is a sense of youthful enthusiasm. This is not surprising given that artistic director Karl Fiorini – himself one of a rising generation of Maltese composers – has given pride of place to several talented young musicians, both local and foreign, who have in turn brought a fresh approach to programming and performance.

This was certainly true of the festival’s closing concert, which featured re:orchestra, an ensemble made up of young performers from the Netherlands.

The orchestra was conducted by its founder and director, Roberto Beltrán-Zavala. The evening started with a tribute to Richard Wagner on the bicentenary of his birth. Wagner composed his Siegfried Idyll in 1870 and had it performed at his villa as a birthday surprise for his wife Cosima. Despite its intimate scoring, this work manages to sound as lush as Wagner’s grander, larger-scale creations. Beltrán-Zavala drew impassioned playing from the orchestra, while the more playful moments were given their due emphasis with fine woodwind and brass solos.

Dutch alto Carina Vinke then joined the string section for a rendition of Il Tramonto, Ottorino Respighi’s 1914 setting of Shelley’s The Sunset.

Vinke’s dark-hued voice was well-suited to Respighi’s late-Romantic outpouring and her intense and dramatic delivery more than made up for what might have been lacking in clarity of diction.

After the interval, Vinke returned with the full ensemble for Fiorini’s Kennst du das Land. Mignon’s song from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is typical of German Romanticism in its nostalgic and exotic description of a half-remembered, half-imagined Italy, and it has drawn the attention of several composers including Beethoven, Schubert and Hugo Wolf.

Fiorini’s setting emphasises the mysterious and gothic aspects of the text, with spiralling string themes and menacing motifs on pianoforte and brass, evoking a less savoury side to the “land where lemon trees blossom”.

Even the calmer passages sound eerie, suggesting the atmosphere of a Mahlerian nightscape. Vinke and the ensemble gave a convincing performance of this challenging and virtuosic composition.

The concert came to a close with Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony Op 83a, Rudolf Barshai’s idiomatic orchestral arrangement of the composer’s fourth string quartet.

It was Shostakovich’s disgust at the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union that led him to write this composition, which is permeated by Jewish song. Shostakovich’s sense of protest surfaces most clearly in the last of the four movements – a nightmarish dance which increases in intensity before seemingly wearying itself out.

Although in this conclusive Allegretto the ensemble exuded the raw energy of a klezmer band, its performance was at its most moving in the elegiac second movement, in which the players, under Beltrán-Zavala’s unfussy direction, managed to strike a well-judged balance between sentiment and sentimentality.

Although this concert had many memorable moments, it is the Andantino’s haunting oboe theme over sobbing strings that will linger longest in my mind.

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