I love Rotterdam’s De Doelen. A vast chandeliered expanse of inclusive 1960s brutalism with the most acoustically exciting auditorium pretty much anywhere, this people’s palace welcomes everybody. And I don’t just mean the building. De Doelen communicates brilliantly with its audience. When was the last time you received an illuminating podcast along with your e-ticket?
Connections were very much the theme of Thursday night’s exuberant meeting of two triumvirates; Brahms, Dvořák and Price, and the Rotterdam Philharmonic welcoming back its former Chief Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, together with young American virtuoso and champion of Price’s music, the magical Randall Goosby.
Budding pianist Florence Price was only four in 1892 when Antonín Dvořák crossed the Atlantic with a trunk full of European Romanticism and a following breeze of his native Czech folksong, to take up the helm of the National Conservatory of America where founder Jeanette Thurber operated a radical inclusion policy – talented students were admitted no matter their gender or race. Ears peeled for an identifiably American sound, Dvořák found it in the expanse of the New World and in the soulful lyricism of African-American spirituals. By the time Price had left her native Arkansas and emerged from the Boston Conservatory (where she had to register as Mexican to dodge their colour bar) the musical heritage of both continents had combined to create a sound that has its roots firmly in romanticism but enjoyed a late flourishing into something less introspective, more spacious. When Price’s Symphony no. 1 in E minor (the same key as Brahms 4) was performed in Chicago in 1932, it was the first time a concert hall audience had heard music composed by a Black woman.
At ease, after Nézet Séguin’s somewhat frenetic opening blast of Dvořák's Carnival, Goosby demonstrated the dextrous charm and control that makes him Price’s greatest contemporary champion. Not as virtuosic as the Romantic works that inspired it, Price’s Violin Concerto no. 2 rises organically out of a super-concentrated lyricism that was at one with Goosby’s clear, songlike tone. When a performance sounds this effortless you know the work is there – in this case, Goosby’s absolute mastery of the bow – apparently magnetised to the string – created an arresting intensity of sound, which only occasionally felt a little overpowered by the enormous forces of the orchestra. It was however the encore that really brought the soloist’s virtuosity and passion to centre stage. Coleridge Taylor Perkinson’s Louisiana Blues Strut does exactly what it says on the tin, and more: Goosby absolutely ripped up the place in a breathtaking slide-guitar style blues that would surely have blown the mind of Antonio Stradivarius as he fashioned the same instrument that took such gymnastic effects in its stride.
The joy of musical connection was complete when Goosby returned to the stage in the second half, this time at the back of the first violins, for Brahms' Fourth Symphony. In Nézet Séguin’s full-body work-out, he at times he appeared to be hauling the sound from the very heart of the orchestra, at others eagerly springing from one side of the podium, and at the rapturous applause there were hugs for as many section leaders as furniture and instruments would allow.
There’s no better compliment to an orchestra than for the visiting soloist to pull up a chair, and no greater expression of musical friendship than that they gladly gave him a desk. Welcome to Rotterdam.
