City of London Festival with Henning Kraggerud

London Mansion House
Thursday 02 July, 7.30pm

Vivaldi The Four Seasons
Erik-Sven Tüür Action – Illusion – Passion
Einojuhani Rautavaara Fiddlers
Esa-Pekka Salonen Stockholm Diary [UK premiere]

Henning Kraggerud violin
Jacqueline Shave leader
Britten Sinfonia

The Guardian
The Telegraph
Classical Source.com

The Guardian
Britten Sinfonia/KraggerudMansion House, London
4 stars
By Erica Jeal
Sunday 5 July 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/05/britten-sinfonia-review

Who needs a music director when, like the Britten Sinfonia, you can work with such imaginative soloists? Their latest collaboration saw the strings teaming up with the Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud, whose unselfconscious stage presence and easy virtuosity galvanised an ensemble that already plays with refreshing freedom.

Kraggerud was in charge for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and clearly wanted the audience on board. Introducing each concerto and providing handouts of Vivaldi’s accompanying poems, he made sure we knew exactly what each of these pictorial pieces was describing, then played them with just as much vividness. Birdsong imitations rang out in free rhythms, summer storms raged at frenzied speeds, autumn booze-ups brought both physical and musical lunges, and the slow movement of Winter played to the accompaniment of raindrops falling outside via randomly accented violin pizzicatos.

The works in between, directed by the violinist Jacqueline Shave, fitted both the exuberant Vivaldi and the City of London festival’s northern theme. Erkki-Sven Tüür’s 1993 Action-Illusion-Passion upwardly building middle movement and obsessively driven outer ones shared an all-pervading momentum. Einojuhani Rautavaara’s 1952 Fiddlers was just as spirited. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Stockholm Diary, in its UK premiere, was a larger-scale conception of broad sweeps and teeming textures that unleashed the full orchestra sound, even if the ending, an abrupt petering-out, was unconvincing.

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Britten Sinfonia at the City of London Festival Review
Britten Sinfonia combine lesser-known Nordic pieces with Vivaldi’s celebrated Four Seasons in a delightful evening of music-making 
By Ivan Hewett
03 July 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalconcertreviews/5733997/Britten-Sinfonia-at-the-City-of-London-Festival-review.html

’Northern Cities’ is a theme of this year’s City of London Sinfonia, but this riveting concert from the Britten Sinfonia gave the theme an extra twist. Here music from three Nordic countries was interwoven with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. But this wasn’t a simple case of ’warm and impassioned’ versus ’cool and bleak’, as the three Nordic pieces had their own special kind of heat.

The Estonian composer Eko-Sven Tuur’s ’Action-Illusion-Passion’ built a gripping intensity out of simple things. The beginning was wonderful, with flung-out chords interspersed with dancing patterns played with bouncing bows. I’ve always found Tuur’s way of building to a climax and then allowing the texture to melt into modernistic haze rather facile, but this orchestra almost made me change my mind. It’s a small band - a mere two dozen or so string players - but their sound was so powerful it seemed to press against the gilded walls of the Mansion House.

Their performance of the slow, inward moments in ’Fiddlers’ by senior Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara showed they can also make a lovely pianissimo sound too, delicate and strong as a steel thread. We had another Finnish piece too, a ’Stockholm Diary’ by Esa-Pekka Salonen. It was clearly a busy time for Salonen, but that’s about all I gleaned from this frenetically active piece.

In between we went south, for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. These days Baroque bands tend to treat this piece as a virility test, each trying to outdo the other in making the fast bits faster, the strange picture-painting sounds more weirdly coloured, and the contrasts more explosive. On that level Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud, who led this performance, can certainly hold his own. But what made the performance so winning is that these things always had an expressive purpose, prompted by the detailed poetic descriptions Vivaldi appended to the score.

The third movement of ’Spring’ began amusingly with the strings sliding up to their drone note, like a bagpipe being warmed up. In the slow movement of ’Winter’, Kraggerud got the violinists to put random accents in their parts, to create a pattering raindrop effect. His own solos were blisteringly virtuoso, but not in a flashy way; you could tell Vivaldi’s expressive intent was always uppermost in his mind. Here and there the musical sense was compromised by the constant tempo changes. But on the whole the performance had a delightfully naïve freshness.

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City of London Festival – Britten Sinfonia at Mansion House [The Four Seasons]
Reviewed by: Ben Hogwood
Mansion House, London EC4
Thursday, July 02, 2009

Revisiting the City of London Festival’s preoccupation this year with music from along the latitude of 60° North, the Britten Sinfonia offered this imaginative programme of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, interspersed with three 20th-century works from Baltic composers.

Of late, and possibly because of its overwhelming popularity, it has become more common for record and concert organisers to cast Vivaldi’s Seasons in new and contexts. While Mansion House was almost overwhelmingly baked in summer heat from start to finish, so fresh was the approach of Henning Kraggerud and the Sinfonia that Vivaldi’s changes in mood and temperature could all be keenly felt.

Kraggerud spoke before each ‘Season’, establishing pointers for the audience and conveying his affection for Vivaldi’s characterisation and violin-writing. The violinist’s light humour was most endearing, and this transferred to the music itself – he staggered about on the stage, playing the drunkard when indicated in ‘Autumn’, and in the slow movement of ‘Summer’, when the violinist has a rest, he appeared also to be slumbering lightly.

Technically he was superb, and was helped greatly by the arrangement of the Sinfonia. Save for the cellos and double basses the Britten musicians stood throughout, meaning Kraggerud, standing in the middle, was able to face each section in turn. As a result ensemble was well-nigh-faultless, helped greatly by incisive playing from leader Jacqueline Shave.

The players took great care to emphasise and occasionally exaggerate Vivaldi’s depictions of the weather and the domestic associations he has with each season. This they did through close attention to detail, dynamics, bowing and phrasing, with staccatos crisp and the slow movements weightless. Harpsichordist Maggie Cole, who played superbly throughout, hit the underside of the harpsichord to provide the marching rhythm for the finale of ‘Spring’, while that of ‘Autumn’ was curiously phrased. ‘Winter’, meanwhile, was pure delight, whether in the pizzicato depiction of rain falling on the windows or in Kraggerud’s virtuoso playing. Throughout the four concertos tempos were on the fast side, occasionally threatening clarity of phrasing but always yielding crisp rhythms and bright textures.

The music of Erkki-Sven Tüür bisected ‘Spring’ and ‘Summer’, his three-movement work for strings something of a concerto that brought to mind Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks and Britten’s Simple Symphony. A rhythmically fertile first movement, with syncopated block chords, was superseded emotionally by ‘Illusion’, the most passionate movement of the three growing from a small cell to a strong, treble-heavy climax; the bright textures of ‘Passion’ shimmered like a glassy lake, the chosen motif a Reichian melodic figure.

Rautavaara’s Fiddlers, an early suite for strings in five short movements, was a particularly good choice with which to open the concert’s second half. Its 20th-century-harmonic rusticity aligned nicely with that of ‘Spring’ and ‘Summer’. The Sinfonia, led energetically by Shave, caught the folksy inflections of the melodic writing and introduced a note of poignancy in the lower strings for ‘Mr Jonas Kopsi’ and charmed with the intentionally ‘wrong’ notes of ‘Jumps’.

Stockholm Diary was almost a bridge too far, its sonorities piercing the otherwise forgiving acoustic of the hall, but the performance was once again beyond flaw. Esa-Pekka Salonen wrote the piece in 2004 following a commission from the Stockholm Concert Hall Foundation, and while the overall sweep of the single movement was impressive the feeling remained this may have been better served as a concert opener.

As an encore the players revisited the slow movement of ‘Winter’, completing a concert of outdoor music that gave much pleasure to audience and performers alike, reaffirming the Britten Sinfonia’s reputation as an ensemble with a highly imaginative and spontaneous approach to music-making.

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