In the case of Garry Walker winner in 1999 it was this competition
Posted in General on 16. Oct, 2010
In the case of Garry Walker, winner in 1999, it was this competition that clinched his decision to lay down his cello bow and take up the baton professionally. This year’s announcement of Paul Watkins as first prize-winner may deprive the world of another fine cellist.There wasn’t much doubt as to who should carry off the top award in the final orchestral concert at the end of a week of preliminary rounds. Out of the three male finalists, from 16 competitors – of which, disappointingly, only one was a woman – the audience and the jury were in complete agreement, giving Watkins both the £3,000 top award and an extra £1,000 courtesy of the audience ballot. His reading of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was not only extremely assured, it sounded fresh, dynamic and thoroughly persuasive. Tempos were well-judged, woodwind textures were finely balanced against the clearly articulated string sound of the Orchestra of Opera North, and in his steady yet purposeful approach, Watkins never imposed his own ego.The surprise was in the placing third of Benjamin Wallfisch. Not only was it a first in the history of the competition – previously, there have been two runners-up, no second and third placing – but it was a curious and surely unwarranted gesture by the jury against a competent contestant. After all, isn’t half the conducting battle a confidence trick anyway? If Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite occasionally seemed to lack natural flow in its linear ingenuity and rhythmic elaborations, the primitive force of “Kastchei’s Dance” seethed with vigour.It’s difficult enough to compare conducting style and technique in such opposites as Beethoven and Stravinsky, but Elgar’s Enigma Variations, which opened the concert, come with too much baggage to make competition material.
Despite his carefully executed performance, Toby Purser’s colourless interpretation didn’t breathe any new life into Elgar’s musical portraits yet he walked away with second placing and, like Wallfisch, a meagre prize of £1,000.The possibility of engagements with orchestras around the country is probably not the most attractive aspect of the first prize to a serious musician like Watkins. But kudos – increased exposure and the beginning of a reputation – is infinitely more valuable than cash, and this may turn out to be the cementing of another major conducting career.. Pan back 20 or so years and the “authenticity movement” was a divisive force hellbent on confronting anyone who begged to challenge its influence How things have changed. Nowadays, one-time early music gurus conduct Romantic music romantically and symphonic conductors take hints from the period-instrument lobby. And yet the earnestness of those older documents, or at least of those that had something new to say, still fascinate. True, Nikolaus Harnoncourt had already brought baleful period wind textures and rough-cut pre-Classical strings to the same repertoire, often with stimulating results, but Goebel’s Bach was refreshingly outspoken and, more often than not, better-played. DG has packed a healthy chunk of it into an eight-CD budget-price set, including the Suites, the Brandenburgs and a comprehensive range of violin, gamba and flute sonatas, the last two featuring, respectively, Jaap Ter Linden and Wilbert Hazelzet.Effective sampling is simple.
Try the whirling finale of the Third Brandenburg (Wendy Carlos had nothing on this) or the intimacy of the Second Suite, scaled down to chamber-size proportions. The majority of fiddle sonatas have Goebel bowing a sleek, free-flowing solo line above the equally unfettered harpsichord playing of Robert Hill. No rivals from the “authentic” sphere are quite as imaginative and the range of repertory is very wide, including two sets of violin sonatas (BWV1014-1019 and 1020-26) and two sets of flute sonatas (BWV 1030-2 and 1033-5), where other less comprehensive surveys include only one set of each.The Suites and Brandenburgs are also central to a cheap Bach collection of French Record Club recordings from the 1960s by the Saar Chamber Orchestra under the much-respected Karl Ristenpart. Talk about different worlds! Where Goebel dispatches his phrases with what seems like the mere flick of the wrist, Ristenpart’s Bach is stately, rhythmically emphatic and conventionally expressive, which means plenty of the period-player’s traditional b? noir – vibrato. But it’s all so musical.There are no chamber works programmed, but Accord adds a majestic orchestration of Bach’s crowning contrapuntal testimony, The Art of Fugue, where the closing “Contrapunctus” – originally left unfinished and presented here with its cliff-hanging last phrase intact – sounds like a gothic Bach orchestration by Stokowski or Respighi. Both collections programme the dramatic but relatively unfamiliar Triple Concerto (BWV1044), and Ristenpart adds the concertos BWV1062 and BWV1065, for two and four harpsichords respectively.His line-up of soloists is formidable: the flautists Michel Debost and Jean-Pierre Rampal; Maurice Bourge playing cor anglais; the cellist Andr?avarra (not that you hear much of him); the trumpeter Roger Delmotte; the harpsichordists Fritz Neumeyer and Robert Veyron-Lacroix – all front-rankers, pre-eminent in their day. Unlike DG’s immaculately engineered collection, this sonically dusty set warrants a little special pleading on technical grounds: some recordings are in stereo, others in mono and there’s the odd minor tape blemish.
But the playing attests to a sincere, unselfconscious brand of musicianship that, in the case of The Art of Fugue especially, yields deeply satisfying results.Bach: Brandenburg Concertos, Suites, chamber works – Musica Antiqua K?Reinhard Goebel (DG Archiv 471 656-2, eight discs)Bach: Brandenburg Concertos, Suites, Art of Fugue, etc – Saar Chamber Orchestra/Karl Ristenpart (Accord/Discovery 465 893-2, six discs). The late Nat “King” Cole’s younger brother Freddy once had a hit with a tune called “I’m not my brother, I’m me”. Natalie Cole could be forgiven for voicing similar sentiments, for the jazz world seems to be reluctant to accord her a place in her own right. The triple-volume New Grove Dictionary of Jazz grants her no entry, nor do the collected works of that doyen of critics, Whitney Balliett, make reference to her. Her style, a little on the showy side, may lead some to class her among the “singer” rather than the “jazz singer” category. But, as her considerable scatting abilities demonstrate, that is surely a mistake.This invitation-only event in the ballroom of the Langham Hilton was a sumptuous affair, her own backing quartet and the BBC Big Band being augmented by a string section, French horns, vibes and even a harp.