Maestros in the making at the Pärnu Music Festival

Ten for the price of one. That’s not an offer you see every day. The prospect of ten young conductors at work in a single concert was an intriguing one, all the more so when eight of their number were each assigned separate movements in a pair of Classical-era symphonies. These would-be maestros are all participants in the conducting masterclasses led by Paavo Järvi at ‘his’ music festival in Pärnu, in partnership with his own erstwhile teacher, Leonid Grin. They were leading the (mostly) young and local musicians of the Järvi Academy Sinfonietta. Thus we were witnessing work in progress, with some of the candidates inevitably more the finished article than others. 

There is a risk of such events becoming a beauty parade of talent rather than an artistically satisfying experience. Nevertheless, orchestras take the measure of a conductor within the first ten bars; why shouldn’t audiences? There are many reasons why (not), the first of them arising with Guro Haugli’s conducting of Arvo Pärt’s Psalom. Haugli’s self-contained podium language complemented the asceticism of Pärt’s four-part texture for strings. All one could meaningfully observe was that she carried the players with her in a piece where nuances of timing and dynamic are everything.

Pola Benke set Haydn’s Surprise Symphony off to a buoyant start, with the unheralded surprise pedal-note in the first movement’s coda nicely pointed. The famous surprise itself was a bit of a let-down in the hands of Ukki Sachedina, who struggled to achieve truly quiet playing within a rhythmic strait-jacket. The contrast with Alec Frank-Gemmill’s handling of the Minuet was salutary: here was Haydn conducting of appreciable verve and imagination, beautifully weighted inner parts and a relaxed confidence in timing. Julia Kurzydlak follows in the path of Marzena Diakun and Anna Sułkowska-Migoń as one of a host of impressive young Polish (and female) conductors. She has already spent valuable time with Järvi at the Tonhalle in Zurich, and such experience told in her assured handling of the finale, encouraging strings and winds to speak to each other as well as to us. 

After the interval, Mengru Zheng effectively underlined the neo-Gregorian character of Pärt’s L’abbé Agathon, but the thunder was rather stolen by the compelling mezzo of Tuuri Dede. It took some time to establish that Dede was singing in French, but her voice is the birthright of a true Carmen, smoky in the lower register, filling the 900-seat Pärnu Concert Hall with a seductive appeal somewhat at odds with the story of the piece as the meeting of a hermit and a leper.

Mozart’s Symphony no. 39 in E flat major got off to a scrappy start under Andrew Kim, and his rigid beat rather squeezed the life out of the first movement’s proto-Eroican drama. It took a little while for Hannah Schendel to gel the players back together in the Andante: the last note of the main theme was shaded to inaudibility in an exaggerated parody of Classical style, but she gradually relaxed into the movement, and took the musicians with her. Thus Yoona Jeong had conditions on her side when delivering another impressive Minuet, with an especially stylish turn at the close of the trio.

Even so, from my seat, it was Andrei Stănculescu’s finale that really quickened the pulse and won the gold star in my own imaginary contest, alongside Frank-Gemmill’s Haydn Minuet. Stănculescu was moulding each phrase right from the upbeat, and the orchestra instantly raised their game for him. Like several participants, he tended to lead as though inner string parts only mattered when he wanted them to, and otherwise left them to get on with it. Nevertheless, when he brought the symphony to a premature close by skipping the second repeat, I felt cheated of another two minutes in Mozart’s company rather than relieved to be on my way. After unflappably following the gestures of ten different conductors within the space of two hours, the hard-working Sinfonietta players earned the loudest applause of the night.

Peter's press trip was funded by the Pärnu Music Festival.