The JPO’s Splendid Evening with Yasuo Shinozaki

This review was originally posted on the Artslink website.

The trouble with our local symphonic music scene is not that we lack talented musicians or enthusiastic listeners, but that the resources of time and money are so tight that a performance under any particular conductor can only be as good as the conductor is skilled in getting a lot of heavy work done in short bursts of rehearsal time. It was a great pleasure at the JPO’s concert this past Thursday to find that the Japanese conductor Yasuo Shinozaki has exactly the right kinds of skills to get the job done.

From the first moments of the overture by Mendelssohn, Shinozaki established a strong presence and authority. He gave a very clear, very precise beat, and the orchestra played with a wonderfully unified rhythmic precision. There were moments throughout the evening when the string section sounded like one single mammoth instrument, not only nearly perfectly synchronised in their attack and rhythms but also unified in their articulation, phrasing, and tone.

And what tone! The sound that came up to my seat, right at the top of the Linder Auditorium balcony, was glowing, muscular and assured. There was an especially pleasing bass resonance in the cellos’ bottom register and double basses, and a tenor sonority in the middle registers. The woodwinds and brass were no less delightful, playing with equal precision and blending magnificently with the whole ensemble to give an uncommonly balanced sound.

Shinozaki lent good variety to the moods and the colours of the overture, but the evening really took off with the next piece, Weber’s first clarinet concerto, in F minor. The South African clarinettist (now carrying a successful musical career in Europe) Robert Pickup played the solo. I confess partiality towards the instrument and work, because I played clarinet at school. I noticed that my enthusiasm was shared: Chrisna Smith, the JPO’s principal clarinettist, took a seat in the front row of the west mezzanine to watch the performance, and the second clarinettist, Morné van Heerden, dashed up to the balcony to get the full unimpeded view.

Pickup gave us many good reasons to delight. His sound was gracefully rounded and rang out singingly, like a great lyric soprano (or lyric alto, at the bottom of his range), with near-perfect intonation from top to bottom and bright, crisp articulation. He played with strength in some moments and with tenderness at others. His finely-drawn decrescendi at the ends of phrases in the calm slow movement added subtle notes of pain-tinged sadness to the major-key sections.

Other than the blunt intrusion of some unlovely French horns, which hampered some of that sensitivity in the slow movement, the orchestral accompaniment was splendid. Each section played with particular delicacy when required, so as not to overcome the soloist, and continued to play with the exceptional qualities introduced earlier. The quick finale was a great display of that precision, and Pickup used it to his advantage, skipping over the quick rhythms playfully.

Pickup brought out the longer and lower-pitched basset clarinet for his encore, which was a piece by the South African composer Paul Hanmer. (I didn’t catch the name, but I think he said something about a cuckoo.) It sounded like a break on a rural farmyard, with sheep and chickens and various other animals wandering by. The steady, repeating motifs and pentatonic scale gave it the distinct feel of a traditional African folk song, and the many small added blues notes told of Hanmer’s considerable jazz credentials. Pickup ended it by starting a small shuffle on the spot and then slowly walking off stage while still playing.

The final work of the evening was Beethoven’s shattering “Eroica” symphony, the No. 3 in E-flat major. With this symphony, Beethoven famously began his upheaval of the traditional forms and structures of symphonic music, taking the genre to expressive ends never before imagined. Again, under Shinozaki, the orchestra’s clarity and coherence, smart pacing, dramatic variations in dynamics, enduring energy, and strategic building and release of tension all illuminated Beethoven’s complex structures, and revealed the sublime ridiculousness of his innovations.

The burly, robust sound that Shinozaki had achieved from the JPO all evening held true to some of Beethoven’s crazier moments. The scherzo movement was delivered gleefully, and the inventive finale had vitality and drama. They played still with rigour and a sparkle (I was glad to note that we had the superb principal horn player Shannon Armer back on stage for the symphony), but it’s possible for a performance to be too polished, and I missed hearing the outer fringes of Beethoven’s wild, uncontrollable fury, especially in the first movement. The second movement was another matter, however — the true highlight of the evening for me. The funeral march was played with an intense darkness that made the entire hall feel ashen and gloomy. Despite the ritual coughs that multiply whenever a slow movement begins, I was held every second in tight thrall by sounds that threatened to plunge us into perpetual night.

Note: Here’s a rough clip of a few minutes of music during a rehearsal that Shinozaki had with the JPO some time last year, of a far more modern work: