While it may be dangerous or overly sentimental to resort to superlatives, the appearance Saturday, November 2 at Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University, by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra under Neeme J\u00e4rvi, proved that a musical colossus remains thoroughly capable of producing the most intimate effects, especially when every movement, every physical tic and gesture of the master conductor can be read and translated into gorgeous sound.<\/p>\n
By the time J\u00e4rvi, concluded his second Sibelius encore, the ardent lament Andante Festivo (1922; rev. 1938), scored for strings and tympani, the Bing audience no longer knew whether to clap, cheer, or sit still in awed silence. The wild acclimation following the Sibelius Fifth Symphony had already incited the first orchestral encore, the popular Valse Triste, in which J\u00e4rvi, barely had to move to elicit the most glorious nuances and graduated textures from his strings. The opening piece, too, featured the brilliantly homogenous playing of the Estonian string choir, Arvo P\u00e4rt\u2019s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977), a lovely (and relatively brief) elegy for strings and bell that shifts and modulates in extremely small intervals, meant as a tribute to Benjamin Britten, in whose music P\u00e4rt found \u201cunusual purity.\u201d This funeral cort\u00e8ge might have nodded to the Liszt R.W.\u2014Venezia, that composer\u2019s homage to the late Richard Wagner. Each of the successive selections seemed to resonate with yet another section \u2013 or blends of orchestral choirs \u2013 of J\u00e4rvi\u2019s, finely honed ensemble.<\/p>\n
The featured soloist for the plum of the first half, Dvorak\u2019s enduring Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104 (1895), Narek Hakhnazaryan, the 2011 recipient of the Gold Medal at the XIV International Tchaikovsky Competition made an immediate sensation. Setting a tempo that did not dawdle but also broadened with Dvorak\u2019s welter of melodies, J\u00e4rvi, elicited splendid fanfares from his winds and horns, then set a pedal tone for Hakhnazaryan\u2019s warm entry. A long love-affair proceeded, with the soloist often playing directly in rapt dialogue to J\u00e4rvi\u2019s, open embrace, while a voluptuous Allegro emerged, swelled, and then at the major key change in the development, cleared out to allow the solo a most heartfelt expression of anguish \u2013 the piece is a kind of requiem for Dvorak\u2019s great love, Josefina, Countess Counic \u2013 whose only consolation came from the principal flute of the orchestra. The second movement Adagio confirmed the youthful Hakhnazaryan\u2019s cello tone as a source of sweet cream, intoning Dvorak\u2019s own song Lasst mich allein (Leave Me Alone), Op. 82, No. 1 as the main source of melodic melancholy. This elegiac song returned in the Finale, combined with Dvorak\u2019s uncanny ability to create a synoptic overview, a kind of musical equivalent of \u201cAnd so, my children. . .\u201d that lends an atmosphere of Paradise Lost to a remarkable panoply of enchanted melodies.<\/p>\n
But before anyone had stopped his applause, soloist Hakhnazaryan performed an encore, a frantic, often guttural rendition of Lamentatio (1998) by Italian composer-cellist Giovanni Sollima (b. 1962). Chanting in his own voice while playing the most alternately strident and anguished of riffs, Hakhnazaryan sounded like a Celtic priest or Armenian bard, invoking a series of restless spirits who expressed themselves through glissandi, arco and pizzicato bowings, ponticello and harmonics, and any number of contorted effects, the whole absolutely mesmerizing. Even the orchestra musicians seemed to have stopped breathing while the young virtuoso made an impression of artistic subtlety not to be forgotten.<\/p>\n
With the Sibelius Fifth Symphony (1914-1919) Neeme J\u00e4rvi, cemented his own credentials upon a convinced audience. Conceived as a huge, stratified arch, the E-flat Symphony grew organically from an opening horn motif, ushering in the Estonian\u2019s resplendent brass section. After any number of metric permutations and graded dynamics, the first movement sped up frenetically, only to come to a dead halt on the proverbial dime. The solemn tempo of the Andante assumed a golden hue as led by the majestic J\u00e4rvi,, who used the barest gestures to unleash potent utterances in pizzicato strings and staccato flutes that evolved into coloristic variations. Sibelius himself once described this music as \u201cGod\u2019s mosaic,\u201d and certainly J\u00e4rvi\u2019s, studied rendition of the third section\u2019s melding into the last movement combined the rustling of \u201cwhirling wings\u201d with a \u201cswan song\u201d whose final peroration opens the Kingdom of Heaven. With those final hammer blows that end the work, the Bing Hall audience rose in unanimous admiration of a master ensemble led by a Titan.<\/p>\n