One of the fascinations of my summer in France has been seeing four Beethoven concertos and symphonies, played by four different pianists and three different orchestras. It’s been a rare opportunity for immersion in the different styles of these artists and to compare and contrast their approaches.
The Hong Kong Sinfonietta played three concerts here at the Festival International de Piano de La Roque d’Anthéron. In the course of the two I attended, they displayed excellence in every department, with a sound that is indisputably their own. The strings pull off the difficult trick of simultaneously sounding rich in harmonic colour and spare in texture. This is a mid-sized formation of 34 string players using modern bows and instruments, low amounts of vibrato and playing tightly together. The resulting sound is closer to classical elegance than romantic lushness, but with admirable depth. Woodwind solos were full of character, long notes shaped in dynamic and tonal colour, staccato semiquaver runs on bassoon popping.
Conductor Yip Wing-sie was the HK Sinfonietta’s Music Director from 2002 to 2020 and is now styled as Music Director Emeritus. She knows these players backwards and it showed in the comfort they displayed on stage. Her conducting style was economical, occasionally using exceptional hand speed to ensure a clear delineation of the shape and end point of a note.
But two very different pianists gave two very different results.
In the Piano Concerto no. 4 in G major, Anne Queffélec displayed fine piano technique and feel. Her legato was good, she was bright and accurate in her passagework and attentive to the nuances in the music. But, to use an analogy from Masterchef, we were given two great dishes which didn’t belong on the same plate. Queffélec was introspective, immersed in the sound world of her playing, which didn’t project well. More than any other Beethoven piano concerto, the Fourth is a dialogue between pianist in orchestra; on this occasion, the dialogue was far from equal and there was no sense of each party contributing to the other. With soloist and orchestra each doing their own thing, the performance failed to ignite.
That impression was reinforced when Queffélec played a beautiful solo encore, a Handel Minuet, gripping the audience with all the grace and poise you could wish for, and then, after the break, when the HK Sinfonietta gave us a barnstorming, uplifting Beethoven Seventh Symphony overflowing with verve. From the very opening, it was clear that the audience was in for a treat, with Wang Yu-po’s and Akiyo Uesugi’s lilting oboe and flute solos broken by the explosion of orchestral chords, leading to the most delicate of string figures and then to energetic tutti. The steady build of the Allegretto second movement was perfectly weighted, with the insistent cellos underpinning everything like a Renaissance ground bass, the swelling of the suspended chords judged to extract maximum pathos. The third and fourth movements danced; there were perhaps more extremes to be explored, but even so, this was a deeply satisfying performance.