The Enescu Festival reached its midpoint with two performances by the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Jakub Hrůša. While the first was devoted to the music of the second half of the 19th century (Brahms and Dvořák), Monday evening was all about music from the first decades of the 20th.
The suite from Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen was filled with the raw energy and rustic vitality of Moravian folk rhythms. Comprising most of the first act, excluding the vocal parts, the suite was rendered not in Václav Talich’s 1937 version, but in the much later one by his pupil, Sir Charles Mackerras, who rolled back the smoothed-over changes Talich made to the original, “unusual” orchestration. Without visual counterparts, listeners would hardly correlate individual musical snippets (Janáček called them “sčasovka” ) with a pipe-smoking badger, a frog failing to catch a mosquito or a dancing cricket and grasshopper.
Nevertheless, the fairytale atmosphere of a woodland clearing teeming with birdsong and buzzing insects was inescapable. So was the irony of the vixen failing to raise the hens’ feminist awareness, before killing them all and escaping into the forest. The singular rhythms that mark the composer’s very peculiar soundscape were on full display in this wondrous rendition.
The Vienna Philharmonic's perfectly coordinated strings acted as a single, gigantic voice in the extraordinary Prélude à l’unisson, the first part of Enescu’s Orchestral Suite no. 1. Instead of filling a pre-existing space, the monody seemed to define one, with its own tonal and expressive dimensions. The gradual, inexorable expansion was only limited by the subtle presence of tempest-evoking timpani towards the end of the movement and by a warm, circular structure (perhaps an island of human presence) taking shape in the middle parts. In the Finale, the spreading out continued unbridled, moving towards an undefined future. With utmost care, Hrůša painted the transfiguration of the prelude’s austere melodic content into the slowly swirling music of the Menuet lent. He also differentiated the Intermède, with its opening melody intoned by violins and cellos, from its preceding, similarly lyrical part.
Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances have been frequently performed during this anniversary year. Nonetheless, this was a distinguished version, full of precision and energy and, most of all, wonderfully balanced. Dynamic switches were never too abrupt. Fanfares were tempered while laments were at no point overly melodramatic.
Hrůša clearly underlined the many self-references that Rachmaninov employs: the ill-fated First Symphony, The Isle of the Dead, the All-night Vigil motif here dancing – or fighting – with variants of Dies irae. At the same time he frequently pointed up the possible references to the music of Mahler, Sibelius or Prokofiev. This performance was also a showcase for many outstanding instrumental contributions from Concertmaster Volkhard Steude's solo to the rarely used alto saxophone.
