A full house at the Great Subscription, and not just because familiar things like Beethoven were on the program. This evening in the Brucknerhaus was exciting insofar as the two parts seemed like two faces of one and the same thing, like a Beethoven with a laughing and crying mask. The points of view may have something to do with the fact that not only was the excellently arranged Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester (DSO) Berlin on stage under the phenomenal Jukka-Pekka Saraste, but also that a completely different type of artist joined them in Timothy Chooi. The Canadian-American violinist focused on the lyrical side of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and was able to demonstrate his brilliant technique. In interaction with the DSO Berlin, which used significantly more vibrato here and sounded almost a little slowed down, a completely different Beethoven emerged than after the break with his 3rd symphony. Here the focus was on a smooth reading, marked by infinite beauty of tone, rounding the edges even in the third movement and placing the main focus on the solo part and its interpreter.
More radical implementation
With the “Eroica” it was clear from the first chord that Jukka-Pekka Saraste would strike completely different tones here, that the detection of details, the transparency of seemingly irrelevant lines, the finely savored dynamics and an interpretation focused on drama and rhythmic accentuation will be expected. And that’s what the DSO Berlin and Saraste did. It was not new territory that was plowed here, but it was a more radical implementation of Beethoven’s musical thinking than before with the violin concerto. The opening piece of the evening, the “Symphonic Fragment for Orchestra” composed in 2008, was new for most, in which Rodion Shchedrin dealt musically with Beethoven’s “Heiligenstadt Testament” and wrote an eloquent compositional explanation of Beethoven’s “Eroica”. One that also started there on the part of the performers and thus formed a dramatic framework around a lyrically deciphered violin concerto.
Source: Nachrichten
