There are many strings to Pekka Kuusisto’s bow – soloist, composer, arranger, conductor – but you could also add innovator, provocateur, disruptor. The many facets of this diamond of a musician were on display in an invigorating encounter with Aurora Orchestra – innovators themselves – at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Kuusisto simply does things differently. Most conductors would place Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, with its stirring ‘swan’ theme and dramatic, isolated closing chords, at the end of an orchestral programme. Not Kuusisto, who concluded the first half with his fellow Finn, leaping from the stage into the Stalls to loudly applaud Aurora’s performance. Perhaps that’s why the second half of the evening felt like the after-party, a lock-in jamming session with Swedish folk musician Ale Carr joining the band in an unconventional take on Vivaldi’s ubiquitous Four Seasons.
The evening began quietly, an arrangement of Caroline Shaw’s string quartet Plan & Elevation stealing in on the softest of strings, questioning, rippling, rocking. Inspired by the estate grounds at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC where Shaw was a composer-in-residence, its five movements are nostalgic and wispy, sepia vignettes played with great subtlety by the 19 strings (standing), Kuusisto leading. The second movement, The Cutting Garden, contains phrases borrowed from other quartets – I spotted Ravel’s and Mozart’s K.387, but there could have been more.
The strings were bolstered to 33 in number for Sibelius 5, although there were times when they still felt a few desks light. Instead, this lean and lithe approach, with aggressive accents – the orchestra again standing – emphasised the Arctic chill in the first movement. Kuusisto clearly has a lot of ideas about this music and articulated them well, but with a simple technique and without any baton-twirling grandstanding. The surge and swell in the Andante heralded a sense of impetuosity, there was icy precision to the pizzicatos and the brass rang out in the famous finale.
But it was the Vivaldi lock-in that made this such a memorable encounter. Returning to 19 strings, this was ‘big band’ Vivaldi, but played with vigour and imagination. Ale Carr, a Viking giant of a man with blond curls and leather trousers, played the cittern like a rock god. Looking like a supersized, pear-shaped mandolin, the cittern has ten steel strings. Amplified here, it added a zesty continuo to Vivaldi’s score, Carr even contributing solo riffs to the middle movement of Autumn. But he and Kuusisto added their own cheeky interpolations – folk music from their Nordic homelands to snippets of Beethoven 7 and Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending. At one point, leader Maia Cabeza, almost dancing on tiptoe, even threw in a snatch of La Follia.
The Vivaldi itself burst with Baroque’n’roll thrust. Kuusisto gave his players metrical freedom in the birds’ Spring twittering, while every bark of Ruth Gibson’s viola dog felt like a different breed. Summer heat raged fiercely, insects swarming, the shards of ice opening Winter had Psycho energy. Kuusisto wove his way through Vivaldi’s undergrowth with the wonder of someone discovering these riches for the first time, even though he and Carr have played this together many times. Indeed, it was the sheer exuberance of the music-making that marked this out as a memorable evening.
