BEETHOVEN PLUS 2
KRYSIA OSOSTOWICZ: Violin
DANIEL TONG: Piano
ABERDEEN SALVATION ARMY CITADEL
Thursday, 05 November 2015
Today’s Lunchbreak Concert was the second in a series of five in which violinist Krysia Osostowicz and pianist Daniel Tong will perform all ten of Beethoven’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano, each one twinned with a recently commissioned contemporary piece that draws its inspiration from some particular aspect of its attendant Beethoven Sonata.
I am sure that if there had been a sound Festival in Beethoven’s day, his music would definitely have been included in its programming because so much that he composed was radically new at the time. There had been nothing like it before and today’s Sonata, No. 9 Op. 47 known as the “Kreutzer” is certainly like that. Krysia Osostowicz informed us that the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer was the second choice of dedicatee for this work which now bears his name. Kreutzer, despite his German sounding name was French, having been born in Versailles but his father was German. Despite having had the work dedicated to him, Kreutzer never played it, calling it “unplayable and incomprehensible”.
The opening movement is certainly not run of the mill. It starts with the violin alone playing a strong entry to which the piano then replies. This sense of conversation, like question and response, continues to some extent through the entire work but is a special feature of the first movement. One could say that at times there is a kind of argument between the two instruments, the sort of thing that you more often find in a concerto perhaps?
There is a second feature that runs through this first movement and that is the running contrast between slow and very fast music. This seems to function as much of the formal working out of the movement. Both players gave fantastic performances here with Krysia in particular giving us a splendidly strong and fiery account of the faster passages. Daniel Tong’s gloriously fluent playing at the same time added the necessary lightness and buoyancy to the texture.
Like the first Sonata we heard yesterday, Beethoven gives us a marvellous theme and variations as his second movement. The theme itself has a minuet-like grace to it and then there is a wonderful variation that I feel could have been inspired by one of those mechanical birds that existed in salons of the time. Our two players certainly conjured up a picture of that for me.
The final movement of the Sonata is a Tarantella that fulfils something like the function of the more traditional rondo. Here Krysia was on fire with her most vehement and exciting playing while Daniel was equally fast and fluent, continuing to add a special lightness to the blend.
Yesterday, the two new commissions by contemporary composers were played before the Beethoven Sonatas. That was likely because the first one by Jonathan Dove used as its inspiration music from the very beginning of the first sonata. Today’s new piece by conductor and composer Matthew Taylor (b. 1964) was entitled Tarantella Furiosa so it was easy to see which movement of the Beethoven he had settled on.
We were told that his aim had been to outdo Beethoven in the matter of speed which of course is the raison d’être of a tarantella. You could hear clear connections with Beethoven’s original in Taylor’s music but more so than yesterday’s pieces it had more of a modernist flavour to it. There was just a small peppering of special violin techniques in it and the pizzicato passages were terrifyingly fast. I don’t know how Krysia managed to fit them into the allotted space but she did. It was a splendidly exciting piece with a marvellous spicing of good humour and the duo surely did it justice.
