An Impressive Start to the JPO’s 2019 Winter Season

I was excited for the opening concert of the JPO’s 2019 Winter Season for a number of reasons. Firstly, to hear the orchestra back in its home venue, at the Linder Auditorium in Parktown. The last time I heard the JPO was at the Opera Jewels concert, which was held in the totally unsuitable Teatro at Montecasino; the sound stopped dead at the end of the stage. In my regular seat at the very top of the centre balcony in the Linder Auditorium, the blend of sound I get is the most resonant and most balanced on offer. Secondly, I was looking forward to hearing Haydn once again after a long absence of his works from JPO programmes. Thirdly, I was most eager to hear from one of my favourite conductors of any JPO season, the Japanese guest Yasuo Shinozaki.

I first heard Shinozaki with the JPO last November, when the clarinettist Robert Pickup played the first Weber concerto with the orchestra. As I reported, I was struck by the orchestra’s precision, unity, and strength under him. Those same qualities were present in his return this season.

The first concert started with a particularly tasteful and refined rendition of Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony (No. 94 in G major). Nobody can be prevented from loving this work, not even by a bad performance, and this was a very good performance. The tempo was measured in the famous second movement — with its sudden loud tutti chord and timpani stroke that gives the work its nickname — and delightfully quick in the third movement, a minuet that patently danced.

The true wonder of the evening was the Venezuelan pianist Edith Peña, who showed up to play Saint-Saëns’s Second Piano Concerto in G minor. It’s a marvellous piece that delivers great drama and thrills to an audience when played well. Peña played it magnificently. From the first notes of the long, improvisational piano solo that starts the first movement, Peña showed amazing power and control over both the composition and the Steinway before her. Her sound is large and ringing, like she’s playing on dozens of huge church bells instead of a normal keyboard. Her fast passages were dazzlingly agile, and her slow moments were calm and assured. She struck inimitable life and colour into each key; jolted by the vigorous shock that she delivered as she thundered into the hectic last movement immediately after finishing the playful second movement, my companion and I both laughed out loud.

The second week of the Winter Season, also conducted by Shinozaki, yielded similar pleasures. After Weber’s Der Freischütz overture opened the concert, the JPO launched into one of the most popular of all concertos and a cornerstone of the cello repertoire, Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor. It was propelled into its current eminent status by the passionate cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who first recorded it in 1965, and her version is still one of the best-selling classical records of all time.

I know virtually nothing about playing the cello, but the young Russian cellist Alexander Ramm gave a very good lesson in what it can sound like. He, too, played with immense power, filling the entire hall with sound, and with a precision and control that outshone even that of Shinozaki. Elgar’s concerto, written near the end of his life, shortly after World War I, feels elegiac, but still has an English pastoral quality to it. Elgar himself was said to whistle its melodies as he walked in the English countryside. Ramm performed with a deeply emotional lyricism, like a Puccini hero (and sometimes heroine) ready to risk it all.

The concert closed with Sibelius’s First Symphony, a work that I definitely haven’t got a firm grasp on yet. I’ve heard recordings of it, but, as with many complex and layered musical works, a live performance provided a completely different experience of it, and one that wasn’t altogether enlightening. It contains many of the elements that Sibelius would later expand on in his work. The traditional sonata form, standardised more than a century earlier by Haydn and Mozart, is eroded away. Melodic fragments are introduced, developed, mingled, and transformed in a musical kaleidoscope. There’s a submerged logic that underpins the entire symphony and that connects the musical themes of the four movements. The tension of a structure that builds from the opening of the first movement to the final bars of the last movement is heightened by Sibelius’s ardent emotional substance, sometimes fiery and sometimes plaintive, always imparted in a vibrant palette of orchestral colours. Shinozaki and the JPO did excellent work in exhibiting the work’s many features and merits, and I won’t easily forget the intense focus of their performance, but I still left without a clear view of the entire symphony as a whole. Here’s hoping we get to hear a lot more Sibelius in coming seasons, the better to understand this great composer.